Foreword
This anthology brings together the
three most widely translated, distrib­
uted and influential pamphlets of the
Situationist International available in
the sixties. We have also included an
eyewitness account of the May Events
by a member of Solidarity published in
June 1968. (Dark Star would like to
point out that although Solidarity does
not possess the current 'kudos' or
media/cultural interest possessed by
the Situationists, politically they are
deserving of more recognition and
research).
To briefly s ketch in some historical
context, both The Poverty of Student
Life (also known as Ten Days That
Shook The University), and Paris: May
1968 were conceived as pamphlets.
The Totality for Kids and The Decline
And
Fall
of
The
Spectacular
Commodity Economy were translated
from articles in the Situationist
International journal. The Totality for
Kids, written by Raoul Vaneigem, orig­
inally appeared in two parts in Issue
No 7 (April 1962) and Issue No 8
Oanuary 1963). The Decline and Fall of
The Spectacular Commodity Economy,
written by Guy Debord, originally
appeared in Issue No 10 (March 1966).
The Poverty of Student Life, probably
the most famous or infamous of these
pamphlets, was originally distributed
by AFGES students on 22 November
1966. lt was reissued in March 1967

and in May 1967 it was widely distrib­
uted around the Nanterre campus by
Anarchists. November of that year saw
the publication of Debord's Society of
the Spectacle and December the publi­
cation of Vaneigem's Revolution of
Everyday Life.
What we hope this Anthology will
offer the reader is not only a concise
introduction to the ideas of the
Situationists but also an insight into
what Situationist material was readily
available in the late sixties. For the
non-French speaking person with an
interest in radical politics the chances
are that their encounter with and
knowledge of the Situationists would
be derived from these three pam­
phlets. lt is worth emphasising that
although we recall seeing a duplicated
translation of Society of the Spectacle
it was not until Black & Red published
their translation in 1970 that the book
became generally available. Likewise,
although an edition of Revolution Of
Everyday Life was translated by John
Fullerton and Paul Sieveking and pub­
lished by Practical Paradise in 1972 (in
an edition whose unique selling point ­
to utilise a commercial phrase
seemed to be the book's ability to fall
to pieces in pamphlet-size chunks!), it
was not until Donald Nicholson­
Smith's translation published by Rebel
Press in 1983 that the title became
widely available. If we recall that Chris
-

Gray's seminal Anthology was not
published until 1974 the significance
of these three pamphlets in arousing
interest in the Situationist project at
the time cannot be emphasised
enough.
Whether by intelligent analysis or
chance, the pamphlets also allow the
reader to acquire some knowledge of
the two principal theoreticians of the
Paris�based Situationists, Debord and
Vaneigem, before moving on to their
main texts; whilst The Poverty of
Student Life, with its provocative and
at times humourous writing, serves as
a reminder that the Situationist
International was a group project.
For a substantial period of time
these three pamphlets constituted the
main knowledge of the Situationist
project. With the translation of more .
and more texts it has become easier to
analyse the influences and events that
shaped the Situationist International,
its transition from Lettrism, the influ­
ence of Dada and Surrealism etc, and
even to contemplate Situationist
Exhibitions. However we have no
doubt that these three pamphlets have
both an historical and contemporary
significance.
In the Second Manifesto Of

Surrealism (1930), Andre Breton
wrote:
"There are still today, in the
lycees,even in the workshops, in the
·

street, the seminaries and military bar­
racks, pure young people who refuse
to knuckle down. lt is to them and
them alone that I address myself, it is
for them alone that I am trying to
defend Surrealism against the accusa­
tion that it is, after all, no more than an
intellectual pastime like any other".
In a similar spirit we offer this
anthology to young people of all ages
who refuse to knuckle down.

park Star, London 2001

On

the poverty of student life

Considered in its. economic, political,. psychological, sexual. and particularly intellectual aspects.
and a modest proposal for its remedy

First published in 1966 at the University of
Strasbourg by students of the university and
members of the lntemationale Situationniste.
A few students elected to the student union
printed 1o,ooo copies with university funds. The
copies were distributed at the official ceremony
marking the beginning of the academic year. The
student union was promptly closed by court
order. in his summation the judge concluded:
"The accused have never denied the charge
of misusing the funds of the student union,
Indeed, they openly admit to having made the
union pay some £1500 for the printing and dis'
tribution of 1o,ooo pamphlets, not to mention
the cost of other literature inspired by
"lnternationale Situationniste". These publica­
tions express ideas and aspirations which, to
put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of
a student union. One has only to read what the
accused have written, for it is obvious that these
five students, scarcely more than adolescents,
lacking all experience of real life, their minds
confused by ill-digested philosophical, social,
political and economic theories, and perplexed
by the drab monotony of their everyday life,
make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to
pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright
abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers,
God, religion, the clergy, the governments and
political systems of the whole world.Rejectlng
all morality and restraint, these cynics do not
hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of
scholarship,·the abolition of work, total subver­
sion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution
with "unlicensed pleasure" as its only goat.
In view of their basically anarchist character,
these theories and propaganda are eminently
noxious; Their wide diffusion in both student cir­
cles and among the general public, by the local,
national and foreign press,. are a threat to the
morality, the studies, the reputation .and thus

the very future ofthe students of the University
of Strasbourg."

·

To make • shame more shameful by
giving it publicity
We might very well say, and no one would dis­
agree with us, that the student is the most u ni­
versally despised creature in France, apart from
the priest and the policeman. Naturally he is
usually attacked from the wrong point of view,
with specious reasons derived from the ruling
ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a
true revolutionary, yet a revolutionary critique of
the student situation is currently taboo on the
official Left. The licensed and impotent oppo·
nents of capitalism repress the obvious - that
what is wrong with the students is also what i s
wrong with them. They convert their uncon­
scious contempt into a blind enthusiasm. The
radical intelligentsia (from Les Temps Moderries
to L' Express) prostrates itself before the so­
called rise of the student and the declining
bureaucracies of the Left (from the C6f!1munist
party to the Stalinist National Union of
Students) bids noisily for his moral and !material
support.
There are reasons for this sudd�n enthusi­
asm, but they are all provided by the present
form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state.
We shall use this pamphlet for denunclation. We
shall expose these reasons one by one, on the
principle that the end of alienation is only
readied by the straight and narrow path of alien­
ation itself.
Up to now, studies of student life · have .
ignored the essential issue. The surveys and ..
analyses have all been . psychologicaL or socio­
logical or. economic: in other words, academic
exercises, cqntent with the false categories of
one spedalisation or another. None of them can

achieve what is most needed - a view of modern
society as a whole. Fourier denounced their
error long ago as the attempt to apply scientific
laws to the basic assumptions of the science
("porter regulierement sur les questions primor­
diales"). Everything is said about our society
except what it is, and the nature of its two basic
principles - the commodity and the spectacle.
The fetishism of facts masks the essential cate­
gory, and the details consign the totality to
oblivion.
Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot
everyone a specific role in a general passivity.
The student is no exception to the rule. He has a
provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final
role as an element in market society as conser­
vative as the rest. Being a student is a form of
initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of
more primitive societies with bizarre precision. lt
goes on outside of history, cut off from social
reality. The student leads a double life, poised
between his present status and his future role.
The two are absolutely separate, and the jour­
ney from one to the other is a mechanical event
"in the future." Meanwhile, he basks in a schiz­
ophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his
i n itiation group to hide from that future.
Protected from history, the present is a mystic
trance.
At least in consciousness, the student can
exist apart from the official truths of "economic
life." But for very simple reasons: looked at eco­
nomically, student life is a hard one. In our soci­
ety of abundance, he is still a pauper. So% of
students come from income groups well above
the working class, yet 90% have less money
than the meanest labourer. Student poverty is
an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier
age of capitalism; it does not share in the new
poverties of the spectacular societies; it has yet
to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat.
Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral
prejudices and authority of the family to become
part of the market even before he is adolescent:
at fifteen he has all the delights of being direct­
ly exploited. I n contrast the student covets his
protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile
paradise. Adolescence and its crises may bring
occasional brushes with his family, but in
essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be

treated as a baby by the institutions which pro­
vide his education. (If ever they stop screwing
his arse off, it's only to come round and kick him
in the balls.)
"There is no student problem." Student pas­
sivity is only the most obvious symptom of a
general state of affairs, for each sector of social
life has been subdued by a similar imperialism,
Our social thinkers have a bad conscience about
the student problem, but only because the real
problem is the poverty and servitude of all. But
we have different reasons to despise the student
and all his works. What is unforgivable is not so
much his actual misery but his complaicence in
the face of the misery of others. For him there is
only one real alienation: his own. H e is a full­
time and happy consumer of that commodity,
hoping to arouse at least our pity, since he can­
not claim our interest. By the logic of modern
capitalism, most students can only become
mere petits cadres (with the same function in
neo-capitatism as the skilled worker had in the
nineteenth-century economy). The student real­
ty knows how miserable will be that golden
future which is supposed to make up for the
shameful poverty of the present. In the face of
that knowledge, he prefers to dote o n the pres­
ent and invent an imaginary prestige for himself.
After all, there will be no magical compensation
for present drabness: tomorrow will be like yes­
terday, lighting these fools the way to dusty
death. Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an
u n real present.
The student is a stoic slave: the more chains
authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in
phantasy. He shares with his new family, the
University, a belief in a curious kind of autono­
my. Real independence, apparently, lies in a
d i rect subservience to the two most powerful
systems of social control: the family and the
State. He is their well-behaved and grateful
child, and like the .submissive child he is overea­
ger to please. He. celebrates all the values and
mystifications of the system, devouring them
with all the anxiety of the infant at the breast.
Once, the old illusions had to be i m posed on an
aristocracy of tabour; the petits cadres-to-be
ingest them willingly under the guise of culture.
There are various forms of compensation for
poverty. The total poverty of ancient societies

·

produced the grandiose compensation . of reli­
gion. The student's poverty by contrast is a mar­
ginal phenomenon, and he casts around for
compensations among the most down-at-heel
images of the ruling class. He is a · bore who
repairs the old jokes of an alienated culture.
Even as an ideologist, he is always out of date.
One and all, his latest enthusiasms were ridicu­
lous thirty years ago.
Once upon a time the unive rsities were
respected; the student persists in the belief that
he is lucky to be there. But he arrived too late.
The bygone excellence of bourgeois culture (By
this we mean the culture of a Hegel or of the
encyclopedistes, rathert han the Sorbonne and
the Ecole Normale Superieure) has vanis hed. A
mechanically produced specialist is now the
goal of the "educational system." A modern eco­
nomic system demands mass production of stu­
dents who are not educated and have been ren­
dered incapable of thinking. Hence the decline
of the universities and the automatic n ullity of
the student once he enters its portals. The uni­
versity has become a society for the propagation
of ignorance; "high culture" has taken on the
rhythm of the production line; without excep­
tion, university teachers are cretins, men who
would get the bird from any audience of school­
boys. But all this hardly matters: the important
thing . i s to go on listening respectfully. In time, if
critical thinking is repressed with enough con­
scientiousness, the student will come to partake
of the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell
him the final truths of the world. Till then - a
menopause of the spirit. As a matter of course
the future revolutionary society will condemn
the doings of lecture theatre and faculty as mere
noise - socially undesirable. The student is
already a very bad joke.
The student is blind to the obvious that
even his closed world is changing. The "crisis of
the u niversity" - that detail of a more general
crisis of modern capitalism - is the latest fodder
for the deaf'mute dialogue o f the specialists.
This "crisis" is simple to understand: the diffi­
culties of a specialised sector which is adjusting
·(too late) to a general change in the relations of
production.
There was once a vision - if an ideological
one- of a liberal bourgeois unive rsity. But as its
•

social base disappeared, the vision became
banality. In the age o f free-trade capitalism,
when the "liberal" state left it its marginal free­
doms, the university could still think of itself as
an independent power. Of cou rse. it was il pure
and narrow product of that society's needs par­
ticularly the need to give the privileged minority
an adequate general culture before they
rejoined the ruling class (not that going up to
university was straying very far from class con­
fines). But the bitterness of the nostalgic don
(No one dares any longer to speak in the name
of nineteenth century liberalism; so they remi­
nisce about the "free" and "popular" universi­
ties of the middle ages - that democracy of "lib­
eral") is understandable: better, after all, to be
the bloodhound of the haute bourgeoisie than
sheepdog to the world's white-collars, Better to
stand guard on p rivilege than harry the flock into
their allotted factories and bureaux, according
to the whims of the "planned economy". The
university is becoming, fairly smooth ly, the hon­
est broker Of technocracy and its spectacle. In
the process, the purists of the academic Right
become a pitiful sideshow, purveying their "uni­
versal" cultural goods to a bewildered audience
of specialists.
More serious, and thus more dangerous, are
the mod ernists of the Left and the Students'
Union, with their talk of a "reform of University
structure" and a "reinsertion of the University
into social and economic life", i.e. its adaptation
to the needs of modern capitalism. The one-time
suppliers of general culture to the ruling class­
es, though still guarding their old prestige, must
be converted into the forcing-house of a new
labour aristocracy. Far from contesting the his­
torical process which subordinates one of the
last relatively autonomous social groups to the
demands of the market,. the. progressives com­
plain o f delays and inefficiency in its completion.
They are the standard-bearers of the cybernetic
u niversity o f the future (which has already
reared its ugly head in some unlikely quarters).
And they are the enemy: the fight against the
market, which is starting again in earnest,
means the fight against its latest lackeys.
As for the student, this struggle is fought
out entirely over his head, somewhere in the
heavenly realm of his masters. The whole of his

life is beyond his control, and for all he sees of
the world he might as well be on another planet.
His acute economic poverty condemns him to a
paltry form of survival. But, being a complacent
creature, he parades his very ordinary indigence
as if it were an original lifestyle: self-indulgent­
ly, he affects to be a Bohemian. The Bohemian
solution is hardly viable at the best of times, and
the notion that it could be achieved without a
complete and final break with the university
m i lieu is q u ite l u dicrous. But the student
Bohemian (and every student likes to pretend
that he is a Bohemian at heart) clings to his false
and degraded version of individual revolt. He i s
s o "eccentric" that h e continues - thirty years
after Reich's excellent lessons - to entertain the
most traditional forms of erotic behaviour,
reproducing at this level the general relations of
class soCiety. Where sex is concerned, we have
learnt better tricks from elderly provincial ladies.
His rent-a-crowd militancy for the latest good
cause is an aspect of his real i mpotence.
The student's old-fashioned poverty, howev­
er, does put him at a potential advantage - if only
h e could see it. He does have marginal free­
dams, a small area of liberty which as yet
escapes the totalitarian control of the spectacle.
His flexible working-hours permit him adventure
and experiment. But he is a sucker for punish­
ment and freedom scares him to death: he feels
safer in the straight-jacketed space-time of lee·
ture hall and weekly essay . He is q uite happy
with this open prison organised for his "bene­
fit", and, though not constrained, as are most
people, to separate work and leisure, he does so
o f his own accord - hypocritically proclaiming all
the while his contempt for assiduity and grey
men. He embraces every available contradiction
and then mutters darkly about the "difficulties
of communication" from the uterine warmth of
his religious, artistic or political clique.
Driven by his freely-chosen depression, he
submits himself to the subsidiary police force of
psychiatrists set up by the avant-garde of
repression. The university mental health clinks
are run by the student mutual organisation,
which sees this institution as a grand victory for
student unionism and social progress. Like the
Aztecs who ran to greet Cortes's sharpshooters,
and then wondered what made the thunder and

why men fell down, the students flock to the
psycho-police stations with their "problems".
The real poverty of his everyday life finds its
immediate, p h antastic com pensation in the
opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural
spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the
dutiful disciple. Although he i s dose to the pro­
duction-point, access to t h e Sanctuary of
Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to dis­
cover "modern culture" as an admiring specta­
tor. Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac.
He peeks at the corpse in cine-dubs and the­
atres, buys its fish-fingers from the cultural
supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in
his element: he is the living proof of all the plat­
itudes of American market research: a conspicu­
ous consumer, complete with induced irrational
preference for Brand X (Camus, for example),
and irrational prejudice against BrandY (Sartre,
perhaps).
I mpervious to real passions, he seeks titilla­
tion in the battles between his anaemic gods,
the stars of a vacuous heaven: Althusser Garaudy·Barthes
Picard - Lefebvre
Levi
Strauss Halliday·deChardin Brassens ... and
between their rival theologies, designed like all
theologies to mask the real problems by creat­
ing false ones: h umanism existentialism sci·
entism - structuralism cyberneticism new crit­
meta­
dialectics-of-naturism
icism
philosophism ...
He thinks h e is avant-garde if he has seen
the latest happening. He discovers "modernity"
as fast as the market can produce its ersatz ver­
sion of long outmoded (though once important)
ideas; for him, every rehash is a cultural revolu·
tion. His principal concern is status, and he
eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of
important and "difficult" texts with whiCh mass
culture has filled the bookstores. (If he had an
atom of self-respect or lucidity, he would knock
them off. But no: conspicuous consumers
always pay!). Unfortunately, he cannot read, so
he devours them with his gaze, and enjoys them
vicariously through the gaze of his friends. He is
an other-directed voyeur.
His favourite reading matter is the kitsch
press, whose task it is to orchestrate the con­
sumption of cultural nothing-boxes. Docile as
ever, the student accepts its commercial ukases
•

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·

•

•

and makes them the only measuring-rod of his
tastes. Typically, he is a compu lsive reader . of
weeklies like Le Nouvel Observateur and
L' Express (whose nearest· English equivalents
are the posh Sundays and New Society). He gen­
erally feels that Le Monde - whose style he finds
somewhat difficult - is a truly obj ective newspa­
per. And it is with such guides that he hopes to
gain an understa nding of the mode.rn world and
become a political initiate!
[n France more than anywhere else, the stu­
dent is passively content to be politicised. In this
sphere too,he readily accepts the same alienat­
ed, spectacular participation. Seizing upon all
the tattered remnants of a Left which was anni­
hilated more than forty years ago by "socialist"
reform ism and Stalinist counter-revolution, he is
once more guilty of an amazing ignorance. The
Right is well aware of the defeat of the workers'
movement, and so are the workers themselves,
though more confusedly. But the students con­
tinue blithely to organise demonstrations which
mobilise students and students only. This is
political false consciousness in its virgin state, a
fact which naturally makes the universities a
happy hunting ground for the manipulators of
the declining bu rea ucratic organisations. For
them, it is child's play to program the student's
political options. Occasionally there are devia­
tionary tendencies and cries of "Independence!"
but after a period of token resistance the dissi­
dents are reincorporated into a status quo which
they have never really radically opposed. The
"Jeunesses Commu nistes Revolutionnaires,"
whose title is a case of ideo logical falsification
gone mad (they are neither young, nor commu­
nist, nor revolutionary), have with much brio and
accompanying publicity defied the iron hand o f
t h e Party b u t o n ly to rally cheerily to the pon·
tifical battle-cry, "Peace in Vietnam!"
The student prides himself on his opposi­
tion to the "archaic" Gaullist regime. But he jus­
tifies his criticism by appealing - without realis­
ing it · to older and far worse crimes. His radical·
ism prolongs the life of the different currents of
edulcorated Stalinism: Togliatti's, Garaudy's,
Krush chev's, Mao's, etc His youth is synony­
mous with appaling naivete; and his attitudes
are in reality far more archaic than the regime's the Ga uUists do after all understand modern
·

.••

•.

society well enough to administer it.
But the student, sad to say, is not deterred
by the odd anachronism. He feels obliged to
have general ideas on everything, to unearth a
coherent world-view capable of lending mean­
ing to his need for activism and asexual promis­
cuity. As a result, he falls prey to the last dod­
dering missionary efforts of the churches. He
rushes with atavistic ardor to adore the pu tres­
cent carcass of God, and cherishes all the stink­
ing detritus of prehistoric religions in the tender
belief that they enrich him and his time. Along
with their sexual rivals, those elderly provincial
ladies, the students form the social category
with the highest percentage of admitted ad her·
ents to these archaic cults. Everywhere else, the
p riests have been either beaten off or devoured,
but university clerics shamelessly continue to
bugger thousands of students in their spiritual
shithouses.
We must add in all fairness that there do
exist students of a tolerable intellectual level,
who without difficu lty dominate the controls
designed to check the mediocre capacity
demanded from the others. They do so for the
simple reason that they have understood the
system, and so despise it and know themselves
to be its ene mies; They are in the system for
what they can get out of it - particularly grants.
Exploiting the con tradiction which, for the
moment at least, ensures the maintenance of a
small sector- "research"- still governed by a lib­
eral-academic rather than a technocratic ration­
ality, they calmly carry the germs of sedition to
the highest level: their open contempt for the
organisation is the counterpart .of a lucidity
which enables them to outdo the system's lack­
eys, intellectually and otherwise. Such students
cannot fail to become theorists of the coming
revolutionary movement. For the moment, they
make no secret of the fact that what they take s o
easily from t h e system shaH be used for its over­
throw.
The student, if he rebels at all, must first
rebel against his studies, though the necessity
of this initial move is felt less spontaneously by ·
him than by the worker, who intuitively identifies
his work with his total condition. At the same
time, since the student is a product of modern
society just like Godard or Coca-Cola, his

extrem e alienation can only be fought through
the struggle against this whole society. lt is clear
that the university can in no circumstances
become the. battlefield; t h e . student, insofar as
he defines himself as such, manufactures a
pseudo-value which must become an obstacle to
any dearconsciousness of the reality of his dis­
possession. The best criticism of student life is
the behaviour of the rest .of youth, who have
already started to revolt. Their rebellion has .
become one of the signs of a fresh struggle
against modern society.

lt is not enough for thought to seek
Its realisation in practice: practice
must seek its theory
After years of slumber and permanent counter·
revolution, there are signs of a new period of
struggle, with youth as the new carriers of revo­
lutionary i nfection. But the society of the spec­
tacle paints its own picture of itself and its ene·
mies, imposes its own ideological categories on
the world and its history. Fear is the very last
response. For everything that happens is reas·
suringly part of the natural order of things. Real
historical changes, which show that this society
can be superseded, are reduced to the status of
novelties, processed for mere consumption. The
revolt of youth against an i m posed and "given"
way of life is the first sign of a total subversion.
lt is the prelude to a period of revolt the revolt
ofthose who can no longer live in our society.
Faced with a danger, ideology and · its daily
machinery perform the usual inversion of reality.
An historical process becomes a pseudo-catego­
ry of some socio'natural science: the Idea of
Youth.
Youth is in revolt, but this is only the eternal
revolt of youth; every generation espouses
"good causes," only to forget them when "the
young man begins the serious business of pro­
duction and ·is · given concrete and real social
aims," After the social scientists come the jour·
natists with their verbal inflation. The revolt is
contained .by overexposure: we are given it to
contemplate so that we shall forget to partici­
pate. In the spectacle, a revolution becomes a
social aberration in other words a social safety
valve. which has its part to play in the smooth
•

•

•

working of the system. lt reassures because it
remains a m a rginal .phenomenon, in the
apartheid of the temporary problems of a
healthy pluralism (compare and contrast the
"woman q uestion" and the "problem of racial·
ism"). In reality, if there is a problem of youth in
modern capitalism it is part ofthe total crisis of
that society. lt is just that youth feels the crisis
most acutely.
Youth and its mock freedoms are the purest
products of modern society. Their modernity
consists in the choice they are offered and are
already making: total integration to neo-capital­
ism, or the most radical refusal. What is surpris­
ing is not that youth is in revolt but that its eld·
ers are so soporific. But the reason is history, not
biology - the previous generation lived through
the defeats and were sold the lies of the long,
shameful disintegration of the revolutionary
movement.
In itselfYouth is a publicity myth, and as
part of the new "social . dynamism" it is the
potential ally of the capitalist mode of produc·
tion. The illusory primacy of youth began with
the economic recovery after the second world
war. Capital was able to strike a new bargain
with labour: in return for the mass production of
a new class of manipulable consumers, the
worker was offered a role which gave him full
membership of'the spectacular society. This at
least was the ideal soc ial model, though as
usual it bore little · relation to socio-economic
reality (which lagged behind the c;onsumer ide­
ology). The revolt of youth was the first burst. of
anger at the persistent realities of the new world
the boredom of everyday existence, t h e dead
life which is still the essential product of modern
capitalism, in spite of all its modernisations. A
small section of youth is able to refuse that soci­
ety and its produ cts, but without any idea that
this society can be superseded. They o pt for a
nihilist present.Yet the destruction of capitalism
is once again a real issue, an event in history, a
process which has already begun. Dissident
youth must achieve the coherence of a critical
theory, a n d the practical organisation of· that .
coherence.
At the most primitive level, the "delin·
quents" (blousons noirs) of the world use vio·
lence to express their rejection of society and its
•

sterile options, But their refusal is an abstract
one: it gives them no chance of actually escap­
ing the contradictions of the system. They are its
products - negative, spontaneous, but none the
less exploitable, All the experiments of the new
social order produce them: they are the first
side-effects of the new urban ism; of the disinte­
gration of all values; of the extension of an
increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the
growing control of every aspect of everyday life
by the psycho-humanist police force; and of the
economic survival of a family unit which has lost
all significance.
The "young thug" despises work but
accepts the goods. He wants what the spectacle
offers him - but now, with no down payment.
This is the essential contradiction of the delin­
quent's existence. He may try for a real freedom
in the use of his time, in an individual assertive­
ness, even in the construction of a kind of com­
munity. But the contradiction remains, and kills.
(On the fringe of society, where poverty reigns,
the gang develops its own hierarchy, which can
o n ly fulfil itself in a war with other gangs, isolat­
ing each group and each individual within the
group.) In the end the contradiction proves
unbearable. Either the lure of the product world
proves too strong, and the hooligan decides to
do his honest day's work: to this end a whole
sector of production is devoted specifically to
his recuperation. Clothes, records, guitars,
scooters, transistors, purple hearts beckon him
to the land of the cons. u mer. Or else he is forced
to attack the laws of the market itself- either in
the primary sense, by stealing, or by a move
towards a conscious revolutionary critique of ,
commodity society. For the delinquent only two
futures are possible: revolutionary conscious­
ness, or blind obedience on the shop floor.
The Provos are the first organisation of
delinquency - they have given the delinquent
experience its first political form. They are an
alliance of two distinct elements: a handful of
careerists from the degenerate world of 'art,'
and a mass of beatniks looking for a new activi­
ty. The artists contributed the idea of the game,
though still dressed up in various threadbare
ideological garments. The delinquents had noth­
ing to offer but the violence of their rebellion.
. From the start the two tendencies hardly mixed:

the pre-ideological mass found itself under the
Bolshevik "guidance" of the artistic ruling class,
who justified and maintained their power by an
ideology of provo-democracy. At the moment
when the sheer violence of the delinquent had
become an idea - an attempt to destroy art and
go beyond it - the violence was channelled into
the crassest neo-artistic reformism. The Provos
are an aspect of the last reformism produced by
modern capitalism: the reformism of everyday
life. Like Bernstein, with his vision of socialism
built by tinkering with capitalism, the Provo hier­
archy think they can change everyday life by a
few well-chosen improvements. What they fail to
realise is that the banality of everyday life is not
incidental, but the central mechanism and prod­
uct of modern capitalism. To destroy it, nothing
less is needed than all-out revolution. The
Provos choose the fragmentary and end by
accepting the totality.
To give themselves a base, the leaders have
concocted the paltry ideology of the provotariat
(a politico-artistic salad knocked up from the
leftovers of a feast they had never known). The
new provotariat is supposed to oppose the pas­
sive and "bourgeois" proletariat, still wor­
shipped in obscure Leftist shrines. Because they
despair of the fight for a total change in society,
they despair of the only forces which can bring
about that change. The proletariat is the motor
of capitalist society, and thus its mortal enemy:
everything is designed for its suppression (par­
ties; trade union bureaucracies; the police; the
colonisation of all aspects of everyday life)
because it is the only really menacing force. The
Provos hardly try to understand any of this; and
without a critique of the system of production,
they remain its servants. In the end an anti­
union workers demonstration sparked off the
real conflict. The Provo base went back to direct
violence, leaving their bewildered leaders to
denounce "excesses" and appeal to pacifist sen­
timents. The Provos, who had talked of provok­
ing authority to reveal its repressive character,
finished by complaining that they had been pro­
voked by the police. So much for their pallid
anarchism.
lt is true that the Provo base became revolu­
tionary in practice. But to invent a revolutionary
consciousness their first task is to destroy their

leaders, to rally the objective revolutionary
tions, with their blend of libertarian, political
forces of the proletariat, and to drop the
and religious tendencies, are always liable to
Constants and deVries of this world {one the
the obsession with "group dynamics" which
favourite artist of the Dutch royal family, the
leads to the closed world of the sect. The mass
other a failed M.P. and admirer .o f the English
consumption of d rugs is the expression of a real
police). There is a modern revolution, and one of
poverty and a protest against it; but it remains a
its bases could be the Provos · but only without
false search for "freedom" within a world dedi­
their leaders and ideology. If they want to
cated to repression, a religious critique of a
change the world, they must get rid of these who
world that has no need for religion, least of all a
are content to paint it white.
new one.
I d le reade'r, your cry of "What about
The beatniks - that right wing of the youth
Berkeley?" escapes u s not. True, American soci­
revolt - are the main purveyors of an ideological
ety needs its students; and by revolting against
'refusal' combined with an acceptance of the
their studies they have automatically called that
most fantastic superstitions {Zen, spiritualism,
society in q uestion. From the start ,they have
'New Church' mysticism, and the stale porridge
seen their revolt against the university hierarchy
of Ghandi·ism and humanism). Worse still, in
as a revolt against the. whole hierarchical sys­
their search for a revolutionary program the
tem, the d ictatorship of the economy and the I American students fall into the same bad faith
State. Their refusal to become an integrated part
as the Provos, and proclaim themselves 'the
of the commodity economy, to put theirspe­
most exploited class in our society! They must
cialised studies to their obvious and inevitable
understand one thing: there are no 'special' stu­
use, is a revolutionary gesture. it puts in doubt
dent i nterests in revolution. Revolution will be
that whole system of production which alienates
made by all. the victims of encroaching repres­
activity and its products from their creators. For
sion and the tyranny of the market.
all its confusion and hesitancy, the American
And for the East, bureaucratic totalitarian­
student movement has discovered one truth of
ism is beginning to produce its own forces of
the new refusal: that a coherent revolutionary
negation. Nowhere is the revolt of youth more
alternative can and must be found within the
violent and more savagely repressed - the rising
"affluent society." The movement is still fixated
tide of press denunciation and the new police
on two relatively accidental aspects of the
measures against "hooliga n ism" are proof
American crisis - the Negroes and Vietnam - and
enough. A section of youth, so the right-minded
the mini-groups of the New Le.ft suffer from the
'socialist' functionaries tell us, have n o respect
fact.
for moral and family order {which still flourishes
There is an authentic whiff of democracy in
there in its most detestable bourgeois forms).
their chaotic organisation, but what they lack is
They prefer "debauchery," despise work and
a genuine subversive content. Without it they
even disobey the party police. The USSR has set
continually fall into dangerous contradictions.
up a special ministry to fight the new delinquency.
They may be hostile to the traditional politics of
the old parties; but the hostility is futile, and will
Alongside this diffuse revolt a more specific
be recuperated, so long as it is based on igno­
opposition is emerging. Groups and clandestine
reviews rise and fall with the barometer of police
rance of the political system and naive illusions
repression. So far the most important has been
about the world situation. Abstract opposition to
the publication of the "open letter to the Polish
their own society produces facile sympathy with
Workers Party" by the young Poles Kuron and
its apparent enemies - the so-called Socialist
Modzelewski, which affirmed the ·necessity of
bureaucracies of China and Cuba. A group like
"abolishing the present system of p roduction
Resurgence Youth Movement.can· in the same
and social relations" and that to do this "revolu­
breath condemn the State and praise the
tion is unavoidable." The Eastern intellectuals
"Cultural Revolution"
that pse udo-revolt
have one great task to make conscious the
directed by the most elephantine bureaucracy of
concrete critical action of the workers of East
modern times. At the same time, these organisa•

Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest: the proletarian
critique of the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. I n
the East the problem i s not to define the aims of
revolution, but to learn how to fight for them. I n
the West struggle m a y be easy, b u t t h e goals are
left obscure or ideological; in the Eastern
bureaucracies there are no illusions about what
is being fought for: hence the bitterness of the
struggle. What is difficult is to devise the forms
revolution m ust take in the immediate future.
In Britain, the revolt of youth found its first
expression in the peace movement. lt was never
a whole-hearted struggle, with the misty non­
violence of the Committee of1oo as its most dar­
ing program, At its strongest the Committee
could call 30o,ooo demonstrators on to the
streets, lt had its finest hour in Spring 1963 with
the. "Spies for Peace" scandal. But it had a lready
entered on a definitive decline: for want of a the·
ory the unilateralists fell among the traditional
left or were recuperated by the Pacifist con­
science.
What is left is the enduring (quintessential­
ly English) archaisms in. the control of everyday
life, and the accelerating decomposition of the
old secular values. These could still produce a
total critique of the new life; but the revolt of
youth needs allies. The B ritish working class
remains one of the most militant in the world. lts
struggles - the shop stewards movement and
the growing tempo and bitterness of wildcat
strikes - will be a permanent sore on an equally
permanent capitalism until it regains its revolu­
tionary perspective, and seeks common cause
with the new opposition. The debacle of
Labourism makes that alliance all the more pos­
sible and all the more necessary. If it came
about, the explosion could destroy the old sod·
ety � the Amsterdam riots would be child's play
in comparison. Without it, both sides of the rev­
olution can only be stillborn: practical needs will
find no genuine revolutionary form, and rebel­
lious discharge will ignore the only forces that
drive and can therefore destroy modern capital­
ism. Japan is the only industrialised country
where this fusion of student youth and working
class militants has already taken place.
Zengakuren, the organisation of revolution­
ary students, and the league of Young Marxist
Workers joined to form the backbone of the

Communist Revolutionary. League. The move­
ment is already setting and solving the new
problems of revolutionary organisation. Without
illusions, it fights both western capitalism and
the b u reaucracies of the so-called socialist
states. Without hierarchies, it groups together
several thousand students and w orkers on a
democratic basis, and aims at the participation
of every member in all the activities of the organ·
isation. ,
They are the first to carry the struggle on to
the streets, holding fast to a real revolutionary
program, and with a mass participation.
Thousands of workers and students have waged
a violent struggle with the Japanese police. In
many ways the C.R.L. lacks a complete and con­
crete theory of the two systems it fights with
such ferocity. lt has not yet defined the precise
nature of bureaucratic exploitation, and it has
hardly formulated the character of modern capi­
talism, the critique of everyday life and the cri­
tique of the spectacle. The Communist
Revolutionary league is still fundamentally an
avant-garde political organisation, the heir of
the best features of the classic proletarian
movement. But it is at present the most impor­
tant group in the world and should henceforth
be one of the poles of discussion and a rallying
point for the new proletarian critique.
•

To create at long last a situation
which goes beyond the point of no
return
"To be avant-garde means to keep abreast of
reality" (lnternationa/e Situationniste 8). A radi·
cal critique of the modern world must have the
totality as its object and objective. Its search­
light must reveal the world's real past, its pres·
ent existence and the prospects for its transfor­
mation as an indivisible whole; If we are to reach
the whole truth about the modern world and a
fortori if we are to formulate the project of its
total subversion we must be able to expose its
hidden history; in concrete terms this means
subjecting the history of the international revo­
lutionary movement, as set in motion over a cen­
tury ago by the western proletariat, to a demys­
tified and critical scrutiny.
"This movement against the total organisa•

•

tion of the old world came to a stop long ago"
(lnternationale Situationniste 1). lt failed. Its last
historical appearance was in the Spanish social
revolution, crushed in the. Barcelona 'May Days'
of 1937. Yet its so-called "victories" and
"defeats," if judged i n the light of their historical
consequences, tend to confirm Uebl<necht's
remark, the day before his assassination, that
"some defeats are really victories, while some
victories are more shameful than any defeat."
Thus the first great 'failure' of worl<ers' power,
the Paris Commune, is in fact its first great suc­
cess, whereby the primitive p roletariat pro­
claimed its historical capacity to organise all
aspects of social life freely. And the Bolshevik
revolution, hailed as the proletariat's first great
triumph, turns out in the last analysis to be its
most disastrous defeat.
The installation of the Bolshevik order coin­
cides with the crushing of the Spartakists by the
German "Social-Democrats." The joint victory of
Bolshevism and reformism constitutes a un ity
masked by an apparent incompatibility, for the
Bolshevik order too, as it transpired, was to be a
variation on the old theme. The effects of the
Russian counter-revolution were, internally, the
institution and development of a new mode of
exploitation, bureaucratic state capitalism, and
externally, the growth of the 'Co m m u n ist'
International, whose spreading branches served
the unique purpose of defending and reproduc­
ing the rotten trunk. Capitalism, under its bour­
geois and bureaucratic guises, won a new lease
of life - over the dead bodies of the sailors of
Kronstadt, the U krainian peasants, and the
workers of Berlin, Kiel, Turin, Shanghai, and
Barcelona.
The Third International, ap parently created
by the Bolsheviks to combat the degenerate
reformism of its predecessor, and to unite the
avant-garde o f the proletariat in "revolutionary
commu nist parties," was too closely linked to
the i nterests of its founders ever to serve an
authentic socialist revolution. Despite all its
polemics, the third International was a chip off
the old block. The Russian model was rapidly·
imposed on the Western workers' organisations,
and the evolution of both was thenceforward
one and the same thing. The totalitarian dicta­
tors h i p of the bu reaucratic class over the

Russian pro letariat found its echo in the subjec­
tion of the great mass of workers in other coun­
tries to castes of trade union and political func­
tionaries, with their own private interests i n
repression. While t h e Stalinist monster haunted
the working-class consciousness, old-fashioned
capitalism was becoming bureaucratised and
overdeveloped, resolving its famous internal
contradictions and proudly claiming this victory
to be decisive, Today, though the unity is
obscured by apparent variations and opposi­
tions, a single social form is coming to dominate
the world - this modern world which it proposes
to govern with the p.ri nciples of a world long
dead and gone. The tradition of the dead gener­
ations still weighs like a nightmare on the minds
of the living.
Opposition to the world offered from within
- and in its own terms - by supposedly revolu­
tionary organisations, can only be spurious.
Such opposition, depending o n the worst mysti­
fications and calling on more or less reified ide­
ologies, helps consolidate the social order.
Trade unions and political parties created by the
working class as tools of its emancipation are
now no more than the 'checks and bal�mces' o f
the system. Their leaders have made these
organisations their p rivate property; their step­
ping stone to a role within the ruling c!ass. The
party program or the trade union statute may
contain vestiges of revolutionary phraseology,
but their practice is everywhere reformist - and
doubly so now that official capitalist ideology
mouths the same reformist slogans. Where the
unions have seized power - in countries more
backward than Russia in 1917 the Stalinist
model of counterrevolutionary totalitarianism
has been faithfully reproduced. Elsewhere, they
have become a static complement to the self­
regulation of managerial capitalism. The official
organisations have become the best guarantee
of repression - without this 'opposition' the
h u manist-democratic facade of the system
would collapse and its essential violence would
be laid bare.
In the struggle ,with the m ilit!lnt proletariat,
these organisations are the unfailing defenders
of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, and the
docile creatures of its foreign policy. They are
the bearers of the most blatant falsehood in a
-

world of lies, working diligently for the perenni­
al and universal d ictatorship of the State and the
Economy. As the situationists put it, "a univer­
sally dominant social system, tending toward
totalitarian self-regulation, is apparently being
resisted - but only apparently - by false forms of
opposition which remain trapped on the battle­
field ordained by the system itself. Such illusory
resistance can only serve to reinforce what it
pretends to attack. B u reaucratic pseudo-social­
ism is only the most grandiose of these guises of
the old world of hierarchy and alienated labour."
As for student unionism, it is nothing but the
travesty of a travesty, the useless burlesque of a
trade unionism itself long totally degenerate.
The principal platitude of all future revolu­
tionary organisation must be the theoretical and
practical denunciation of Stalinism in all its
forms. In France at least, where economic back­
wardness has slowed down the consciousness
of crisis, the only possible road is over the ruins
of Stalinism. lt must become the delenda est
Carthago of the last revolution of prehistory.
Revolution must break with its past, and
derive all its poetry from the future. little groups
of 'militants' who cl a im to represent the authen­
tic Bolshevik heritage are voices from beyond
the grave. These angels come to · avenge the
"betrayal" of the October Revolution will always
support the defence of the USSR - if only "in the
last . instance." The 'under-developed' nations
are their promised land. They can scarcely sus­
tain their illusions outside this context, where
their objective role is to buttress theoretical
underdevelopment. They struggle for the dead
body of 'Trotsky, ' invent a thousand variations
on the same ideological theme, and end up with
the same brand of practical and theoretical
impotence. Forty years of counter-revolution
separate these groups from the Revolution;
since this is not 1920 they can only be wrong
(and they were already wrong in 1920).
Consider the fate . of an ultra-leftist group
like Socialisme ou Barbarie, where after the
departure of a 'traditional Marxist' faction (the
i mpotent Pouvoir Ouvrier) a core of revolution­
ary 'modernists' under Cardan disintegrated and
disappeared within 18 months. While the old
categories are no longer revolutionary, a rejec­
tion of Marxism a la Cardan is no s ubstitute for

the reinvention of a total critique. The Scylla and
Charybdis of present revolutionary action are
the m u seum of revolutionary prehistory and the
modernism of the system itself.
As for the various anarchist groups, they
possess nothing beyond a pathetic and ideolog­
ical faith in this label. They j ustify every kind of
self-contradiction in liberal terms: freedom of
speech, of opinion, and other such bric-a-brac.
Since they tolerate each other, they would toler­
ate anything.
The predominant social system, which flat­
ters itself on its modernisation and its perma­
nence, must now be confronted with a worthy
enemy: the equally modern negative forces
which it produces. let the dead bury their dead,
The advance of history has a practical demysti­
fying effect - it helps exorcise the ghosts which
haunt the revolutionary consciousness, Thus the
revolution of everyday life comes face to face
with the enormity of its task. The revolutionary
project must be re invented, as much as the life it
announces. If the project is still essentially the
abolition of class society, it is.because the mate­
rial conditions upon which revolution was based
are still with us. But revolution must be con­
ceived with a new coherence and a new radical­
ism, starting with a dear grasp of the failure of
those who first began it. Otherwise its fragmen­
tary realisation will bring a bout only a new divi­
sion of society.
The fight between the powers-that-be and
the new proletariat can only be in terms ofthe
totality. And for this reason the future revolu­
tionary movement must be purged of any ten­
dency to reproduce within itself the alienation
produced by the commodity system; it must be
the living critique of that system and the nega­
tion of it, carrying all the elements essential for
its transcendence. As lukacs correctly showed,
revo lutionary organisation is this necessary
med iation between theory and practice,
between men and history, between the Dams of
workers and the proletariat constituted as a
class (Lukacs' mistake was to believe that the
Bolsheviks fulfilled this rote). If they are to be ·
realised in practice, "theoretical" tendencies or
differences must be translated into organisa­
tional problems, lt is by its present organisation
that a new revolutionary movement will stand or

fall. The final criterion of its co herence will be
the compatibility. of its actual form with its
essential project - the international and
absolute power of Workers' Councils a s fore­
shadowed by the proletarian revolutions of the
last hundred years. There can be no compromise
with the foundations of existing society - the
system of commodity production; ideology in all
its guises; the State; and the imposed division of
labour from leisure.
The rock on which the old revolutionary
movement foundered was the separation of the­
o ry and practice. Only at the supreme moments
of struggle did the proletariat supersede this
division and attain theirtruth. As a rule the prin·
ciple seems to have been hie Rhodus hie non
salta. Ideology, however 'revolutionary,' always
serves the ruling class; false consciousness is
the alarm signal revealing the presence of the
enemy fifth column. The lie is the essential pro­
d uce of the world of alienation, and the most
effective killer of revolutions: once an organisa­
tion which claims the social truth adopts the lie
as a tactic, its revolutionary career is finished.
All the positive aspects of the Workers'
Councils must be already there in an organisa­
tion which aims at their realisation. All relics of
the Leninist theory of organisation m ust be
fought and destroyed. The spontaneous creation
of Soviets by the Russian workers in 1905 was in
itself a practical critique of that baneful theory,
yet the Bolsheviks continued to claim that work­
ing-class spontaneity could not go beyond
"trade union consciousness" and would be
unable to grasp the "totality." This was no less
than a decapitation of the proletariat so that the
Party could place itself "at the head" of the
Revolution. If once you dispute the proletariat's
capacity to emancipate itself, as Lenin did so
ruthlessly, then you deny its capacity to organise
all aspects of a post-revolutionary society. In
such a .context, the slogan "All Power to the
Soviets" meant nothing more then the subjec:
tion of the Soviets to the Party, and the installa­
tion of the Party State in place of the temporary
'State' of the armed masses.
"All Power to the Soviets" is still the slogan,
but this time without the Bolshevik after.
thoughts. The proletariat can only play the. game
of revolution if the stakes are the whole world,
·

·

for the only possible form of workers' power generalised and complete autogestion - can be
shared with nobody. Workers' control is the abo­
lition of all authority: it can abide no limitation,
geographical or otherwise: any compromise
amounts to surrender, "Worl�ers' control m ust
be the means and the end of the struggle: it is at
on�;e the goat of that struggle end its adequate
form."
Atotal critique of the world is the guarantee
of the realism and reality of a revolutionary
organisation. To tolerate the existence of an
oppressive social system in one place or anoth­
er, simply because it .is packaged and sold as
revolutionary, i s to, condone u niversal oppres­
sion. To accept alienation as inevitable in any
one domain' of social life is to resign oneself to
reification in all its forms. lt is not enough to
favour Workers' Councils in the abstract; in con­
crete terms they mean the abolition of com­
modities and therefore of the proletariat.
Despite their superficial disparities, all existing
societies are governed by the logic of commodi­
ties - and the commodity is the basis of their
dreams of self-regulation. This famous fetishism
is still the essential obstacle to a total emanci·
pation, to the free construction of social life. In
. the world of commodities, external and invisible
forces direct men's actions; autonomous action
directed towards clearly perceived goals is
impossible. The strength of economic taws lies
in their ability to take on the appearance of nat­
ural ones, but it is also their weakness, for their
effectiveness thus depends only on "the lack of
consciousness of those who help create them."
The market has one central pr-inciple - the
loss of selfin the aimless and unconscious ere·
ation of a world beyond the control of its cre­
ators. The revolutionary core of a utogestion i s
the attack on this principle. Autogestion i s con·
scious direction by all of their whole existence, lt
is not some vision of a workers' control of the
market, which is merely to choose one's own
alienation, . to program one's own s u rvival
(squaring the capitalist circle). The task of the
Workers' Councils will not be the autogestion of
the world which exists, but its continual qualita­
tive transformation. The commodity and its laws
(that vast detour in the history of man's procjuc·
tion of himself) will be superseded by a new

·

social form.
With autogestion ends one of the funda­
mental splits in modern society - between a
labour which becomes increasingly reified end a
"leisure" consumed in passivity. The death of
the commodity naturally means the suppression
of work and its replacement by a new type of
free activity. Without this firm intention, socialist
groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie or Pouvoir
Ouvrier fell back on a reformism of labour
couched in demands for its 'humanisation.' But
it is work itself which must be called into ques­
tion. Far from being a 'Utopia,' its suppression is
the first condition for a break with the market.
The everyday division between 'free time' and
'working hours,' those complementary sectors
of alienated life, is an expression of the internal
contradiction between the use-val u e and
exchange-value of the commodity. it has become
the strongest point of the commodity ideology,
the one contradiction whi c h intensifies with the
rise of the consumer. To destroy it, no strategy
short of the abolition of work will do. lt is only
beyond the contradiction of use-value and
exchange-value that history begins, that men
make their activity an object of their will and
their consciousness, and see themselves in the
world they have created. The democracy of
Workers' Councils is the resolution of all previ­
ous contradictions. lt makes "everything which
exists, apart from individuals, impossible.''
What is the revolutionary project? The con­
scious domination of history by the men who
make it. Modern history, like all past history, is
the product of social praxis, the unconscious
result of human action. In the epoch of totalitar­
ian control, capitalism has produced its own reli­
gion: the spectacle. In the spectacle, ideology
becomes flesh of our flesh, is realised here on
earth. The world itself walks upside down. And
like the 'critique of religion' in Marx's day, the
critique of the spectacle is now the essential
precondition of any critique.
The problem of revolution is once again a
concrete issue. On one side the grandiose struc­
tures of technology and material production; on
the other a dissatisfaction which can only grow
more profo u nd. The bourgeoisie end its Eastern
heirs, the bureaucracy; cannot devise the means
to use their own overdevelopment, which will be

the basis of the poetry of the future, simply
because they both depend on the preservation
of the old order. At most they harness over­
development to invent new repressions. For they
know only one trick, the accumulation of Capital
and hence of the proletariat - a proletarian being
a man with no power over the use of his life, an d
who knows it. The new proletariat inherits the
riches of the bourgeois world and this gives it its
historical chance. Its task is to transform and
destroy these riches, to constitute them as part
of a human project: the total appropriation of
nature and of human nature by man.
A realised human nature can only mean the
infinite multiplication of real desires and their
gratification. These real desires are the underlife
of present society, crammed by the spectacle
into the darkest corners of the revolutionary
unconscious, realised by the spectacle only in
the dreamlike delirium of its own publicity. We
must destroy the spectacle itself, the whole
apparatus of commodity society, if we are to
realise human needs. We must abolish those
pseudo-needs and false desires which the sys­
tem manufactures daily in order to preserve its
power.
The liberation of modern history, and the
free use of its hoarded acquisition, can come
only from the forces it represses. I n the nine­
teenth century the proletariat was already the
inheritor of philosophy; now it inherits modern
art and the first conscious critique of everyday
life, with the self-destruction of the working
class art, and philosophy shall be realised. To
transform the world and to change the structure
of life are one and the same thing for the prole­
tariat - they are the passwords to its destruction
as a class, its dissolution of the present reign of
necessity, and its accession to the realm of liber­
ty. As its maximum program it has the radical cri­
tique and free reconstruction of all the values
and patterns of behaviour imposed by an alien­
ated reality. The only poetry it can acknowledge
is the creativity released in the making of histo­
ry, the free invention of each moment and each
event: Lautreamont's poesie faite par tous - the
beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For
proletarian revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in
revolution the road of excess leads once and for
all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which

knows only one rationality: the game : The rules
are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering
death, and to indulge untrammelled desire.

Postscript: if you make a social revo­
lution, do it for fun

CE D E R
un

pE U

=' J$
B
CR P I T U L E R
B E A UCOU P

If the above text needed confirmation, it was
amply provided by the reactions to its publica­
tion. In Strasbourg itself, a very respeGtable and
somewhat olde-worlde city, the traditional reflex
of outraged horror was still accessible - witness
judge Llabador's naive admission that our ideas
are subversive (see our introduction). At this
level too, the press seized on the passing
encouragements to stealing and hedonism
(interpreted, inevitably, in a narrow erotic
sense). The union cellars had become the most
infamous dive in Strasbourg. The offices had
been turned into a pigsty, with students daubing
the walls and relieving the m selves in the corri­
dors. They had come with inflatable mattresses
to sleep on the premises "with women and chil­
dren"! Minors had been perverted ...
The amoral popular press was of course at
wit's end to find adequate labels: the Provos, the
Beatniks, and a "weird group of anarchists"were
variously reported to have seized power in the
city. Under the direction of situationist beatniks,
the University restaurant was in the red, and the
union's Morsiglia holiday camp had been used
free, gratis and for nothing by these gentlemen.
SoJ11e tried their hand at analysis, but only
communicated the incomprehension of a man
suddenly caught in quicksands: "The San
Francisco and London beatniks, the mods and .
rockers of the English beaches, the hooligans
behind the Iron Curtain, all have been largely
superseded by this wave of new-style nihilism.
Today it is no longer a matter of outrageous hair
and clothes, of dancing hysterically to induce a
state of ecstacy, no longer even a matter of
entering the artificial paradise of drugs. From
now on, the international of young people who
are 'against it' is no longer satisfied with provok­
ing society, but intent on destroying it - on
destroying the very foundations of a society
'made for the old and rich' and acceding to a
state of 'freedom without any kind of restriction
whatsoever' ".

it was the Rector of the University who led
the chorus of modernist repression: "These students have insulted their professors", h e
declared, "They should be dealt with by psychi­
atrists. I don't want to take any legal measures
against them - they should be in a lun atic asy­
lum. As to their incitement to illegal acts, the
Minister of the Interior is looking into that". ("I
stand for freedom", he added.) Later, besieged
by the press, he reiterated that, "We need so c i­
ologists and psychologists to explain such phe­
nomena to us". An Italian journalist replied that
some of his most brilliant social science stu­
dents were in fact responsible for the whole
affair. The situationists had an even better reply
to such appeals to the psychiatric cops: through
the agency of the student mutual organisation,
they officially closed the local student psychi­
atric clinic. lt is to be hoped that one day such
institutions will be physically destroyed rather
than tolerated, but in the meantime this 'admin­
istrative' decision has such an exemplary value
that it is worth quoting:
"The administrative comm ittee of the
Strasbourg section of the Mutuelle Nationale
des Etudiants de France considering that the
University Psychological Aid Bureaux (BAPU)
represents the introduction of a para-police con­
trol of students, in the form of a repressive psy­
chiatry whose clear function everywhere - some­
where between outright judicial oppression and
the degrading lies of the mass spectacle - is to
help maintain the apathy of all the exploited vic­
tims of modern capitalism; considering that this
type of modernist repression ... was evoked as
soon as the Committee of the General Federal
Association of the Strasbourg Students made
known its adhesion to situationist theses by
publishing the pamphlet On Student Poverty...
and that Rector Bayen was q u ite ready to
denounce those responsible to the press as, "fit
cases for the psychiatrists"; considering that the
existence of a BAPU is a scandal and a menace
to all those st udents of the University who are
determined to think for themselves, hereby
decides that from the twelfth of January 1967 the
BAPU of Strasbourg shall be closed down."
Another development which must have
been predictable to any studious reader of the
pamphlet was the attempt to explain away the

·

Strasbourg affair in terms of a "crisis in the uni ­
versities". Le Mon.de, the most 'serious' French
paper, and a platform for techn ocratic liberal­
ism, kept its head while all around were losing
theirs. After a long silence to get its breath back,
it published an article which shackled situation­
is! activity in . Alsace to the "present student
malaise" (another symptom: fascist violence in
Paris U niversity), for which the only cure is to
give "real responsibility" to the students (read:
let them direct their own alienation). This type of
reasoning refuses a priori to see the obvious
that so-called student malaise is a symptom of a
far more general disease.
Much was . made of the unrepresentative
character o( the union committee, although it
had been q u ite legally elected. lt i s qu ite true,
however, that our friends got power thanks to
the apathy of the vast majority. The action had
no mass base whatsoever. What it achieved was
.to expose the emptiness of student politics and
indicate the m inimum requirements for any con­
ceivable movement of revolutionary students. At
the general assembly of the National Union of
French Students in January, the Strasbourg
group proposed· a detailed motion calling for the
dissolution of the organisation, and obtained
the im plicit support of a large number of honest
but confused delegates, disgusted by the corri­
dor politics and phoney revolutionary preten­
sh:ms of the un ion. Such disgust, though per­
haps a beginning, is not enough: a revolutionary
consciousness among students would be the
very opposite of student consciousness. Until
students realise that their interests coincide
with those of all who are exploited by modern
capitalism, there is little or nothing to be hoped
for from the u n iversities. Meanwhile, the exem­
plary gestures of avant-garde m inorities are the
only form of radical activity av�ilable.
This holds good not only in the universities
but almost everywhere. In the absence of a
widespread revolution ary consciousness, a
q u asi-terroristic denunciation of the. official
world is the only possible planned public action
on the part of a revolutionary group. The i m por­
tance of Strasbourg lies in this: it offers one pos­
sible model of sue � action. A situation was cre­
ated in which society was forced to finance, pub­
licise. and broadcast a revolutionary critique of

·

itself, and furthermore to confirm this critique
through its reactions to it. lt was essentially a
lesson in turning the tables on contemporary
society. The official world was played with by a
group that understood its nature better than the
official world itself. The exploiters were elegant­
ly exploited. But despite the virtuosity of the
operation, it should be seen as no more than an
initial and, in view of what i s to come, very mod­
est attempt to create the praxis by which the cri­
sis of this society as a whole can be precipitated;
as such. it raises far wider problems of revolu­
tionary organisation and tactics. As the mysteri­
ous M.K. remarked to a jou rnalist, Strasbourg
itself was no more than "a little experiment".
The concept of 'subversion' (detournement),
originally used by the situationists in a purely
cultural context, can well be used to describe
the type of activity at present available to us on
many fronts. An early definition: "the redeploy­
ment of pre-existing artistic elements within a
new ensemble ... Its two basic principles are the
loss of i mportance of each originally independ·
ent element (which may even lose its first sense
com p.letely), and the organisation of a new sig­
nificant whole which confers a fresh meaning on
each element" (cf. /nternation.ale Situation.niste
3, pp 10-11). The historical sign ificance of this
technique o r game derives from its ability to
both devalue and 'reinvest' the heritage of a
dead cultural past, so that "subversion negates
the value of previous forms o f expression but
at the same time expresses the search for a
broader form, at a higher level for a new cre­
ative currency". S u bversi o n counters the
.manoeuvre of modern society, which seeks to
recuperate and fossilise the relics of past ere·
ativity within its spectacle. lt is clear that this
struggle on the cultural terrain is no different in
structure from the more general revolutionary
struggle; subversion can therefore also b e con·
ceived as the creation of a new use value for
political and social deb ris: a student union, for
example, recuperated long ago and turned into a
paltry agency of repression, can become a bea·
con of sedition and revolt. Subversion is a form
of action transcending the separation between
art and politics: it is the art of revolution.
Strasbourg marks the beginning of a new
period of situationist activity. The social position
.•.

•

of situationist thought has been determined up
to now by the following contradiction: the most
highly developed critique of modern life has
been made in one of the least highly developed
modern cou ntries - in a country which has not
yet reached the point where the complete disin­
tegration o f aU values becomes patently obvious
and engenders the corresponding forces of radi­
cal rejection. In the French context, situationist
theory has anticipated the social forces by which
it will be realised.
In the more highly developed countries, the
opposite has happened: the forces of revolt
exist, but without a revolutionary perspective.
The Committee of 100 or the Berkeley rebellion
of 1964, for example, were spontaneous mass
movements which collapsed because they
proved incapable of grasping more than the inci­
dental aspects of alienation (the Bomb, Free
Speech ), because they failed to understand
that these were merely specific manifestations
of everyone's excluSion from the whole of his
experience, on every level of individual and
social life. Without a critique of this fundamental
alienation, these movements could never articu­
late the real dissatisfaction which created them
- dissatisfaction with the nature of everyday life
- while as specialised 'causes' they could only
become integrated or dissolve. As a shrewd
Italian journalist wrote in L'Europeo, situationist
theory is the 'missing link' in the development of
the new forces of revolt the revolutionary per­
spective of total transformation still absent fro m
the immense discontent of contemporary youth,
as from the industrial struggle which continues
i n all its violence at shop-floor level. The time
wilt come and our job is to hasten it when
these two currents join forces. Louise Crowley
has indicated the reactionary role to which the
old workers' movement i s now doomed: the
maintenance of work made potentially un neces­
sary by the progress of automation. Whatever
Solidarity may think, outright opposition to
forced labour is going to become a rallying-point
of revolutionary activity in the most advanced
areas of the world.
Already, in the highly industrialised coun­
tries, the decomposition of modern society is
becoming obvious at a mass level. All previous
ideological explanations of the world have col•••

•

•

lapsed, and ·left the misery and chaos of every­
day life without any coherent dissimulation at
all. Politics, morality and culture are all in ruins
and have now reached the point of being mar­
keted as such, as their own parody, the specta­
cle of decadence being the last desperate
attempt to stabilise the decadence of the spec­
tacle. Less and less masks the reduction of the
whole o f life to the production and consumption
of commodities; less and less masks the rela­
tionship between the isolation, em ptiness and
anguish of everyday life and this dictatorship of
the commodity; less and less masks the increas­
ing waste of the forces of production, and the
richness of lived experience now possible if
these forces were only used to fulfil human
desires instead of to repress them.
If England is the tem porary capital of the
spectacular world, it is because no other cou ntry
could take.its demoralisation so seriously. The
island, having recovered from its fit of satirical
giggles, has flipped out. The consumption of
hysteria has become a principle of social pro­
duction, but one where the real banality of the
goods l<eeps breaking the surface, and letting
loose a necessary violence - the violence of a
man who has been given everything, but finds
that everything is phoney. Fashion accelerates
because revolution is treading on its tail.
With the end of the first phase of pop, the
spectacle i s beginning to pitch its convu lsive
tent in the th eatre and the art galle ry.
Degenerate bourgeois entertainment is dying of
self-consciousness and impotent dislike of its
audience: rather than mount improvised 'politi­
cal' tear-jerkers, it should learn to destroy itself.
Now is the time for a Christopher Fry revival.
Fake culture, fake politics. If we pass over
student unionism in Anglo-America, it is out of
simple contempt. There is a sharpening o f the
pseudo-struggle (Reagan versus the Regents,
LSE versus Addams), but its only i nterest is in
guessing which side is financed by the CIA. The
triumph of Wilsonism is more important, since
its harsh mediocrity reveals the logic of modern
capitalism: the stronger ·the Labour Movement,
with its bone-hard hierarchies and its school­
teacher notions of techno logy and s.o cial justice,
the greater the guarantee of total repression.
The militant proletariat, whose opposition to the
•

capitalist system is unabated,. will remain revo­
lutionary chickenfeed till the myth of the Labour
Movement has been finally l?id.
With the decline of the spectacular antago­
nisms
(Tory /Labou.r,
East/West,
High
Culture/Low Culture), the official Left is looki ng
around for new mock battles to fight. lt has
always had a masochi�tic urge to embrace the
tough minded alternative. The orthodox 'commu­
nist' party owed its popularity among the
lumpenintelligentsia to an assertion that it was
too practical to have thne for theory - a claim
amply confirmed by its . own blend of flaccid
intellectual nullity and permanent political
impotence. Those who counsel "working within
the. Labour Movement" play on the same secret
craving to rush around with buckets of water try­
ing to light a fire. The latest enthusiasm of the
left is Mao's "cultural revolution", that farce pro­
duced by cou rtesy of the Chinese bureaucracy
(complete with blue jokes about red panties). To
repeat an old adage, there is no revolution with­
out the arming of the working-class. A revolution
of unarmed schoolChildren, which even then has
to be neutered by the "support" of the army, is a
pseudo-revolution. serving some obscure need
for readjustment within the bureaucracy. As a
tactic for bureaucratic reorganisation it is famil­
iar - after the hysterical and ineffective purge of
the Right comes the appeal to "discipline", the
call "to purify our ranks and eliminate individu­
alism" (People's Daily, 21st Feb 1967), and final­
ly the essential purge of the Left. Far from mark­
ing an attack on 'socialist' bureaucracy, the
GPCR marks the bureau cracy's first adjustment
to the techniques of neo-capitalist repression,
its colonisation of everyday life. lt is the begin­
ning of the Great Leap Forward to Kruschov's
Russia and Kennedy's America.
The real revolution begins at home: in the
desperation of consumer production, in the con­
tinuing struggle of the unofficial working class.
As yet this unofficial revolt has an official ideol­
ogy, The notion that modern capitalism is pro­
ducing new revolutionary forces, new poverties
of a new proletariat, is still suppressed. Instead
there is an a priori fascination with the 'conver­
sion' or the 'subversion' of the old union move­
ment. The militants are recuperating themselves
(and their_ intellectual 'advisers' urge on the

process). The only real su bversion is in a new
consciousness and a new alliance - the location
of the struggie in the banalities of everyday life,
in the supermarket and the beatclub as well as
on the shopfloor. The enemy is entrism, cultural
or political. Art and the Labour Movement are
dead! long live the Situationist International!
Members of the lnternationa/e Situationniste
and Students of Strasbourg

.

-

'

.

'

Our Goals & Methods in the Strasbourg Scandal
The various expressions of stupor and indigna­
tion in response to the situationist pamphlet On
the Poverty of StudentLife, which was published
at the ex pense of the Strasbourg chapter of the
French NationaLStudent Union (U N EF), although
havingthe salutary effect of causing the theses
in the pamphleUtself to be rather widely read,
have fnevitably given rise to numerou s miscon­
ceptio ns in the reportage and commentaries on
the SI's role in the affair. In response to all kinds
of illusions fostered by the press, by university
officials and even by a certain n um ber of
unthinking students, we are now going to speci­
fy exactly what the conditions of our interven­
tion were and recount the goals we were pursu­
ing with the methods that we considered consis·
tent with them.
Even more erroneous than the exaggera·
tions of the press or of certain opposing lawyers
concerning the amount of money the SI suppos­
edly took the opportunity of pillaging from the
treasury of t h e pitiful student union is the
absurd notion, often expressed in the journalis­
tic accounts, according to which the SI sunk so
low as to cam paign among the Strasbourg stu­
dents in order to persuade them of the validity of
our perspectives and to get a bureau elected on
such a program. We neither did this nor attempt­
ed the slightest infiltration of the U N E F by
secretly slipping SI partisans into it. One has
only to read us to realise that we have no inter­
est in such goals and do not use such methods.
The fact is that a few Strasbourg students came
to us in the summer of 1966 and informed us
that six of their friends - and not they them­
selves had just been elected as officers of the
·

•

Bureau of the local Students Association

(AFGES), without any program whatsoever and
in spite of their being widely known in the U N E F
a s extremists i n com p lete disagreement with all
the variants of that decomposing body, and even

·

determined to destroy it. The fact that they were
elected (quite legally) clearly showed the corn·
plete apathy of the mass of students and the
complete impotence of the Association's remain­
ing bureaucrats. These latter no doubt figured
that the "extremist" B u reau would be incapable
of finding any adequate way to express its nega­
tive intentions. Conversely, this was the fear of
the students who came to see us; and . it was
mainly for this reason that they had felt they
themselves shouldn't take part in this 'Bureau':
for only a coup of some scope, and not some
merely humorous exploitation of their position,
i could save its members from the air of compro·
mise that such a pitiful role i m mediately entails.
To add to the com p lexity of the problem, while
the students who spoke with us were familiar
with the SI's positions and declared themselves
in general agreement with them, those who
were in the B u reau were for the most part igno·
rant of them, and counted mainly on the stu­
dents we were seeing to determine the activity
that would best correspond to their subversive
intentions.
At this stage we limited ourselves to sug·
gesting that all of them .write and publish a gen·
era! critique of the student movement and of the
society, such a project having at least the advan­
tage of forcing them to clarify in common what
was still u n clear to them. In addition, we
stressed that their legal access to money. and
credit was the most useful aspect of the ridicu·
lous authority that had so imprudently . been
allowed to them, and that a nonconformist use
of these resources would certainly have · the
advantage of shocking many people and thus
drawing attention to the nonconformist aspects
of the content of their text
These comrades agreed with our recom·
mendations. In the development of this p roject
they remained in contact with the SI, particular-

ly through Mustapha Khayati. The discussion
Column, a document that had the merit of stat·
and the first drafts undertaken collectively by
ing in no uncertain terms what his comrades
those we had met with and the members of the
were planning on doing with their positions:
ArGES Bureau - who had all resolved to see the
"The general crisis of the old union apparatuses
'
matter through - brought about an important
and leftist bureaucracies was felt everywhere,
modification of the plan. Everyone agreed on the
especially among the students, where activism,
basis of the critique to be made, and specifically
for a long time. had no other outlet than the
on the main points as Khayati had outlined
most sordid self sacrifice to stale ideologies and
them, but they fou n d they were incapable of
the most unrealistic ambitions. The last squad of
effecting a satisfactory formulation, especially
professionals who elected our heroes didn't
in the short time remaining before the beginning
even have the excuse of mystification. They
placed their hopes for a new lease of life in a
of the term. This inability should not be seen as
group that didn't hide its intentions of scuttling
the result of any serious lad< of talent or experi·
ence, but was sim ply the consequence of the
this archaic militantism once and for all."
extrem e heterogeneity of the group, both within
The pamphlet was distributed point-blank
to the notables at the official opening ceremony
and outside the Bureau. Their initial coming
together on the most vague bases prepared
of the university; simultaneously, the AFG ES
them very poorly to collectively articulate a the·
Bureau made it known that its only 'student' pro­
gram was the immediate dissolution of that
ory they had not really appropriated together. In
Association, and convoked a special general
addition, personal antagonisms and mistrust
arose among them as the project progressed;
assembly to vote on that question. This perspec­
the common concern that the coup attain the
tive immediately horrified many people. "This
most far-reaching and incisive effect was all that
may be the first concrete manifestation of a
still held them together. In such circumstances,
revolt aiming quite openly at the destruction of
Khayati ended up drafting the greater part of the
society," wrote a local newspaper (Dernieres
text, which was periodically discussed and
Nouvelles, 4 December 1966). And L' Aurore of
approved among the gro u p of students at
26 November: "The Situationist International,
an organisation with a handful of members in
Strasbourg and by the situationists in Paris · the
the chief capitals of Europe, anarchists playing
only (few) significant changes being made by
at revolution, talk of. 'seizing power' not in
the latter.
order to keep it, but to sow disorder and destroy
Various preliminary actions announced the
even their own authority." And even in Turin the
appearance of the pamphlet. On 26 October the
Gazetta del Popolo of the same date expressed
cybernetician Moles, having finally attained a
excessive concern: "lt must be considered, how­
professorial chair in social psychology in order
ever, whether repressive measures... might not
to devote himself to the programming of young
risk provoking disturbances ln Paris and other
cadres, was driven from it in the opening min·
university cities in France the Situationist
utes of his opening lecture by tomatoes hurled
International, galvanized by the triumph of its
at him by a dozen students. (Moles was given
adherents in Strasbourg, is preparing to launch
the same treatment in March at the Musee des
a major offensive to take control of the student
Arts Decoratifs in Paris, where this certified
organisations." At this point we had to take into
robot was to lecture on the control of the mass­
consideration a new decisive factor: the situa·
es by means of urbanism; this latter refutation
tionists had to defend themselves from being
was carried out by some thirty young anarchists
recuperated as a 'news item' or an intellectual
belonging to groups that want to bring revolu·
fad. The pamphlet had ended up being trans·
tionary criticism to bear on all modern issues.)
formed into an SI text: we had not felt that" We
Shortly after this inaugural class which was at
could refuse to aid these comrades in their
least as u nprecedented in the annals of the uni­
desire to strike a blow against the system, and it
versity as Moles himself - the ArGES began pub­
was unfortunately not possible for this aid to
licising the pamphlet by pasting up Andre
have been less than it was. This i nvolvement of
Bertrand's comic strip, The Return of the Durruti
•

.••

•

the S I gave us, for the duration of the project, a
function of de facto leadership which we in no
case wanted to prolong beyond this limited joint
action: as anyone can well imagine, the pitiful
student milieu is of no .interest to us. Here as in
any other situation, we simply had to act in such
a way as to make the new social critique that is
presently taking shape reappear by means of
the practice without concessions that is its
exclusive basis. lt was the unorganised charac­
ter of the group of Strasbourg students which
had created the necessity for the direct situa­
tionist intervention and at the same time pre­
vented even the carrying out of an orderly dia­
logue, which alone could have ensured a mini·
mal equality in decision-making. The debate
that normally characterises a joint action u nder·
taken by independent groups had scarcely any
reality in this agglomeration of individuals who
showed more and more that they were united in
their approval of the S I and separated in every
other regard.
lt goes without saying that such a deficien·
cy in no way constituted for us a recommenda­
tion for the ensemble of this group of students,
who seemed more or less interested in joining
the S I as a sort of easy way of avoiding having to
express themselves autonomously. Their lack of
homogeneity was also revealed, to a degree we
had not been able to foresee, on an u nexpected
issue: at the last minute several of them hesitat,
ed before the forthright distribution of the text
at the university's opening ceremony. Khayati
had to show these people that one m ust not try
to make scandals half way, nor hope, in the
midst of such an act in which one has already
implicated oneself, that one wilt become less
implicated by toning down the repercussions of
the coup; that on the contrary, the success of a
scandal is the only relative safeguard for those
who have deliberately triggered it. Even more
unacceptable than this last-minute hesitation on
such a basic tactical point was the possibility
that some of these individuals, who had so little
confidence even in each other, would at some
point come to make statements in our name.
Kliayati was thus charged by the SI to have the
AFG£5 Bureau declare that none of them was a
situationist. This they did in their communique
of 29 November: "None of the members of our

Bureau belongs to the Situationist International,
a movement which for some time has published
a journa,l of the same name, but we .declare our­
selves in complete solidarity with its analyses
and perspectives." On the· basis of this declared
autonomy, the SI then .addressed a letter to
Andre Schneider, president of the AFGES, and
Vayr-Piova, vice-president, to affirm its total sol·
idarity with what they had done. The SI's soli·
darity with them has been maintained ever
since, both by our refusal to dialogue with those
who tried to approach us while manifesting a
certain envious hostility toward the Bureau
members (some even having the stupidity to
denounce their action to the SI as being "spec·
tacular"!) and by our financial assistance and
public support during the subsequent repres·
sion (see the declaration signed by 79
Strasbourg students at the beginning of April i n
solidarity with Vayr-Piova, who h a d been
expelled from the university; a penalty that was
rescinded a few months later). Schneider and
Vayr-Piova stood firm in the face of penalties and
threats; this firmness, however, was not main­
tained to the same degree in their attitude
toward the SI.
The judi cial repression immediately initiat·
ed in Strasbourg · and which has since been fol­
lowed by a series of proceedings in the same
vein that are still going on concentrated on the
s upposed illegality of the AFGES Bureau, which
was, upon the publication of the situationist
pamphlet, suddenly considered as a mere 'de
facto Bureau' usurping the union representation
of the.students. This repression was all the more
necessary since the holy alliance of the bour·
geois, the Stalinists and the priests, formed in
opposition to the AFGES, enjoyed an 'authority'
even smaller than that of the Bureau among the
city's 18,ooo students.' lt began with the court
order of 13 December, which sequestered the
Association's offices and administration and
prohibited the general assembly that the Bureau
had convoked for the 16th for the purpose of vot­
ing on the dissolution of the AFGES. This ruling
(resulting from the mistaken belief that a major•
ity of the students were likely to support the
Bureau's position if they had the opportunity to
vote on it), by . freezing the development of
events, meant that our comrades - whose only
•

·

perspective was to destroy their own position of
leadership without delay - were obliged to con­
tinue their resistance until the end of January.
·
The Bureau's best practice u ntil then had been
their treatment of the mass of journalists who
were flocking to get interviews: they refused
most of them and insultingly boycotted those
who represented the worst institutions (French
Television, Planete); thus one segment of the
press was induced to . give a more exact account
of the scandal and to reproduce the AFG ES com­
m uniques less inaccurately. Since the fight was
now taking place on the terrain of administrative
measures and since the legal AFGES Bureau was
still in control of the local section of the National
Student Mutual, the Bureau struck back by
deciding on 11 January, and by implementing this
decision the next day, to close the 'University
Psychological Aid Centre' (BAPU), which
depended financially on the Mutual, "consider­
ing that the BAPUs are the manifestation in the
student milieu of a repressive psychiatry's para­
police control, whose clear function is to main­
tain ... the passivity of all exploited sectors... ,
considering that the existence of a BAPU in
Strasbourg is a disgrace and a threat to all the
students of this university who are determined
to think freely." At the national level, the U N EF
was forced by the revolt of its Strasbourg chap­
ter - which had previously been held up as a
model - to recognise its own general bankruptcy.
Although it obviously did not go so far as to
defend the old illusions of unionist liberty that
were so blatantly denied its opponents by the
authorities, the U N E F nevertheless could not
sanction the judicial expulsion of the Strasbourg
Bureau. A Strasbourg delegation was thus pres­
ent at the general assembly of the U N EF held in
Paris on 14 January, and at the opening of the
meeting demanded a preliminary vote on its
motion to dissolve the entire UNEF, "considering
that the U N E F declared itself a union uniting the
vanguard of youth (Charter of Grenoble, 1946) at
a time when workers' unionism had long since
been defeated and turned into a tool for the self­
regulation of modern capitalism, working to
integrate the working class into the commodity
system ... considering that the vanguardist.pre­
tension of the U N E F is constantly belied by its
subreformist slogans and practice... considering

that student unionism is a pure and simple farce
and that it is urgent to put an end to it." This
motion concluded by calling on "all revolution­
ary students of the world... to prepare along
with all the exploited people of their countries a
relentless struggle against all aspects of the old
world, with the aim of contributing toward the
advent of the .international power of the workers
councils." Only two associations, those of
Nantes and of the convalescent-home students,
voted with Strasbourg to deal with this prelimi­
nary motion before hearing the report of the
national leadership (it should be noted, howev­
er, that in the preceding weeks the young U N EF
bureaucrats had succeeded in deposing two
other Association bureaux that had been spon­
taneously in favour of the AFGES position, those
of Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand). The
Strasbourg delegation consequently walked out
on a debate where it had nothing more to say.
The final exit of the AFGES Bureau was not
to be so noble, however. At this time three situ­
ationists (the 'G arnautins') had just been
exclu d ed for having jointly perpetrated - and
been forced to admit before the SI - several slan­
derous lies directed against Khayati, whom they
had hoped would himself be excluded as a
result of this clever scheme (see the 22 January
tract Warning! Three Provocateurs). Their exclu­
sion had no relation with the Strasbourg scandal
- in it as in everything else they had ostensibly
agreed with the conclusions reached in SI dis­
cussions - but two of them happened to be from
the Strasbourg region. In addition, as we men­
tioned above, certain of the Strasbourg students
had begun to be irritated by the fact that the SI
had not rewarded them fo r their shortcomings
by recruiting them. The excluded liars sought
out an uncritical public among them and count­
ed on covering up their previous lies and their
admission of them by piling new lies on top of
them. Thus all those who had been rejected
joined forces in the mystical pretension of going
beyond the practice that had condemned them.
They began to believe the newspapers and even
to expand on them. They saw themselves as
masses who had really 'seized power' in a sort of
Strasbourg Commune. They told themselves
that they hadn't been treated the way a revolu­
tionary proletariat deserves to be treated. They

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assured themselves that their historic action
had superseded all previous theories: forgetting
that the only discernable 'action' i n an affair of
this sort was, at most, the drafting of a text, they
collectively compensated for this deficiency by
inflating their illusions. This amou nted to noth·
ing more ambitious than dreaming together for a
few weeks while continually upping the dose of
constantly reiterated falsifications. The dozen
Strasbourg students who had effectively sup­
ported the scandal split into two equal parts.
This supplementary problem thus acted as a
touchstone. We naturally made no promises to
those who remained "partisans of the SI" and
we clearly stated that we would not make any: it
was simply up to them to be, unconditionally,
partisans of the truth. Vayr-Piova and some oth·
ers became partisans. of falsehood with the
excluded "Garnautins" (although certainly with·
out knowledge of several excessive blunders in
Frey's and Garnault's recent fabrications, but
nevertheless being aware of quite a few of
them). And re Schneider, whose support the liars
hoped to obtain since he held the title of AFGES
president, was overwhelmed with false tales
from all of them, and was weak enough to
believe them without further investigation and
to cou ntersign one o f their declarations. But
after only a few days, independently becoming
aware of a number of indisputable lies that
these people thought it natural 1to tell their initi­
ates i n order to save their miserable cause,
Schneider i mmediately decide � that he should
publicly acknowledge the m istake of his first
course: with his tract Memorie� from the House
of the Dead he denounced those who had
deceived him and led him to share the responsi­
bility for a false accusation against the SI. The
return of Schneider, whose character the liars
had underestimated and who had thus been
privileged to witness the full extent o f their col­
lective m a n i pu lation of embarrassing facts,
struck a definitive blow in Strasbourg itself
against the excluded and their accomplices, who
had already been discredited everywhere else.
In their spite these wretches, who the week
before had gone to so much trouble to win over
Schneider in order to add to the cred ibility of
their venture, proclaimed him a notoriou sly fee­
ble-minded person who had simply succumbed

to "the prestige of the SI." (More and more
often, recently, in the most diverse discussions,
liars end up in this way unwittingly identifying
"the prestige of the SI" with the simple fact of
telling the truth - a n amalgam that certainly
does u s honour.) Before three months had gone
by, "the association of Frey and consorts with
Vayr-Piova and all those who were willing to
maintain a keenly solicited adhesion (at one
time there were as many as eight o r nine of
them) was to reveal its sad reality: based on
infantile lies by individuals who considered each
other to be clumsy liars, it was the very picture,
involuntarily parodic, of a type of 'collective
action' that should never be engaged in; and
with the type of people who should never be
associated with! They went so fa r as to conduct
a ludicrous electoral campaign before the stu­
dents of Strasbourg. Dozens of pages of pedan­
tic scraps o f misremembered situationist ideas
and phrases were, with a total unawareness of
the absurdity, run off with the sole aim of keep­

ing the 'power' of the Strasbourg chapter of the
MNEF, mlcrobureaucratic fiefdom of Vayr-Piova,

who was eligible for re-election 13 April. As suc­
cessful In this ventu re as in their previous
maneouvres, they were defeated by people as
stupid as they were Stalinists and Christians
who were more naturally partial to electoralism,
and who also enjoyed the bonus of being able to
denounce their deplorable rivals as "false situa·
tionists." In the tract The SI Told You So, put out
the next day,Andre Schneider and his comrades
were easily able to show how this u nsuccessful
attempt to exploit the remains of the scandal of
five months before for promotional purposes
revealed itself as the complete renunciation of
the spirit and the declared perspectives of that
scandal. Finally Vayr-Piova, in a com munique
distributed 2 0 April, stated: "I find it amusing to
b e at last denounced as a 'nonsituationist'
something I have openly proclaimed since the S I
set itself up a s an official power." This is a rep­
resentative sample of a vast and already forgot­
ten literature. That the SI has become an official
power this is one of those theses typical of
Vayr-Piova or Frey, which can be examined by
those who are interested i n the q uestion ; and
after doing this they will l<now what to think of
the intelligence of such theoreticians. BuHhis
•

•

-

1

aside, the factthatVayr-Piova proclaims - "open­
, iy," or even perhaps "secretly" in a "proclama­
tion'' reserved for the most discreet accom pli,c es
in his lies, for example? - that he has not
belonged to the SI since whenever was the d ate
of our transformation i nto an "official power" this is a boldfaced lie. Everyone who knows him
1knows that Vayr-Piova has never had the oppor­
!tunity to claim to be anything but a "nonsitua1tionist" (see what we wrote above concerning
he AFGES communique of 29 November).
The most favourable results of this whole
affair naturally go beyond this new and oppor­
1
�unely much-publicised example of our refusal
:to enlist anything that a neomilitantism in
search of glorious subordination might throw
b ur way. No less negligible is that aspect of the
result that forced the official recognition of the
Irreparable d ecomposition of the U N EF, a
ecomposition that was even more advanced
han its pitiful appearance suggested: the coup
�e grace was still echoing in July at its 56th
Congress in Lyon, in the course of which the sad
president Vandenburie had to confess: "The
f,Jn ity of the U N E F has long since ended. Each
i:lSSociation lives (51 note: this term is preten­
tiously inaccurate) autonomously, without pay­
n g any attention to the d i rectives of the
�ational Committee. The growing gap between
fhe base and the governing bodies has reached
a state of serious degradation. The history of the
proceedings of the UN EF has been nothing but a
�eries of crises ... Reorganisation and a revival of
�ction have not been possible." Equally comical
were some side-effects stirred up among the
cademics who felt that this was another current
issue to petition about. As can be well imagined,
e considered the position published by the
forty professors and assistants of the Faculty of
Arts at Strasbourg, which denounced the false
students behind this "tempest in a teacup"
�bout fals,e problems "without the shadow of a
olution," to be more. logical and socially ration­
al (as was, for that matter, Judge Llabador's sum­
lning up) than that wheedling attem pt at
pproval circulated in, February by a few decrepit
lnodern ist-institutionalists gnawing their mea­
gre bones at the professorial chairs of 'Social
Sciences' at Nanterre (impudent Touraine, loyal
Lefeb�,tre, p ro-Ch inese Baudrillart, cunning

�

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Lourau).
In fact, we want ideas to become dangerous
again. We cannot be accepted with the spine­
lessness of a false eclectic interest, as if we were
Sartres, Althussers, Aragons or Godards. Let us
note the wise words of a certain Professor
Lhuillier, reported in the 21 December Nouvel
Observateur: " I am for freedom of thought. But if
there are any Situationists in the room, I want
them to get ouf right now." While not entirely
denying the effect that the dissemination of a
few basic truths may have had in slightly accel­
erating the movement that is impelling the lag·
ging French youth toward an awakening aware·
ness of an impending more general crisis in the
society, we think that the distribution of On the
Poverty of Student Life has been a much more
significant factor of clarification in some other
countries where such a process is already much
more clearly under way. I n the afterward of their
edition of Khayati's text, the English situation·
ists wrote: "The most highly developed critique
of modern life has been made in one of the least
highly developed modern countries in a coun­
try which has not yet reached the point where
the com plete disintegration of all values
becomes patently obvious and engenders the
corresponding forces of radical rejection. In the
French context, situationist theory has antid'pat·
ed the social forces by which it will be realised."
The theses of On the Poverty of Student · Life
have been much more truly understood in the
United States and England (the strike at the
London School of Economics i n March caused a
certain stir, the Times commentator unhappily
seeing in it a return of the class struggle he had
thought was over with).To a lesser degree this is
also the case in Holland · where the SI's critique,
reinforcing a much harsher critique by events
themselves, was not without effect on the recent
dissolution of the ' Provo' movement · and in the
Scandinavian countries. The struggles of the
West Berlin students this year have picked up
something of the critique, though in a still very
confused way.
But revolutionary youth naturally has no
other course than to join with the mass of work·
ers who, starting from the experience ofthe new
conditions of exploitation, are going to take u p
once again the struggle for the domination of
•

their world, for the suppression of work. When
young people begin to know the current theo­
retical form of this real movement that is every­
where spontaneously bursting forth from the
soil of modern society, this is o n ly a moment of
the progression by which this unified theoreti·
cat critique, which identifies itself with an a de·
quate practical unification, strives to break the
silence and the general organisation of separa·
tion. lt i s only in this sense that we find the
result satisfacto ry. We obviously exclude from
these young people that alienated semiprivi·
leged fraction molded by the un iversity: this
sector is the natural base for a n admiring con·
sumption of a fantasised situationist theory
considered as the latest spectacular fashion.
We will continue to disappoint and refute this
kind of approbation. Sooner or later it will be
understood that the SI must be judged not on
the su perficially scandalous aspects of certain
man ifestations through which it appears, but on
its essentially scandalous central truth.

Situationist lntemationai 11,0ctober 1967

®

The Totality For Kids
Almost everyon e has always been excluded from
life and forced to devote the whole 1:>f their en er·
gy to survival. Today, the welfare state i mposes
the elements of this survival in the form of tech·
nological comforts (cars, frozen foods, Welwyn
Gard e n City, Shakespeare televised for the
masses).
Moreover, the organisation controlling the
material equipment of our everyday lives is such
that what in itself would enable us to construct
them richly, plunges us instead into a luxury of
impoverishment, making alienation even more
intolerable as each element of comfort appears
to be a liberation and turns out to be a servitude.
We are condemned to the slavery of working for
freedom.
To be understood, this problem must be
seen i n the light of hierarchical power. Perhaps it
isn't enough to say that hierarchical power has
preserved humanity for thousands of years as
alcohol preserves a foetus, by arresting either
growth or decay. lt should also be made dear
that hierarchical power represents the most
highly evolved form of private appropriation,
and historically is its alpha and omega. Private
appropriation itself can be defined as appropria­
tion of things by means of appropriation of peo·
pie, the struggle against natura l alienation
engendering social alienation.
Private appropriation entails an organisa­
tion of appearances by which its radical contra­
dictions can be dissimu lated. The executives
must see themselves as degraded reflections of
the master, thus strengthening, through the
looking-glass of an illusory liberty, aU that pro·
d uces their submission and their passivity. The
master m ust be identified with the mythical and
perfect servant of a god or a transcendence,
whose substance is no more than a sacred and
a bstract representation of the totality of people
and things over which the master exercises a
power which can only become even stronger as

everyone accepts the purity of his renunciation.
To the real sacrifice of the worl<er corresponds
the mythical sacrifice of the organiser, each
negates h i mself in the other, the strange
becomes familiar and the familiar strange, each
is realised in an inverted perspective. From this
comm o n alienation a harmony is born, a nega·
tive harmony whose fundamental unity lies i n
t h e notion o f sacrifice. This objective (an d per­
verted) harmony is sustained by myth; this term
having been used to characterise the organisa·
tion of appearances in un itary societies, that is
to say, in societies where power over s laves, over
a tribe, or over serfs is officially consecrated by
divine authority where the sacred a llows power
to seize the totality.
The harmony based initially on the 'gift of
oneself' contains a relationship which was to
develop, become autonomous, and destroy it.
This relationship is based on partial exchange
(commodity, money, product, labour force ) the
exchange of a part of oneself on which the bour­
geois conception of liberty is based. it arises as
commerce and technology become preponder­
ant within agrarian-type economies.
When the bourgeoisie seized power they
destroyed its u nity. Sacred p rivate appropriation
became liacised. i n capitalistic mechanisms. The
totality was freed from its seizure by power and
became concrete and immediate once more. The
era of fragmentation has been a succession of
attempts to recapture an inaccessible unity, to
shelter power behind a substitute for the sacred.
A revolutionary movement is when 'all that
reality presents' finds its immediate representa·
••.

tion. For the rest of the time hierarchical power.

always more distant from its magical and mysti·
cal regalia, endeavours to m a ke everyone forget
that the totality (no more than reality!) exposes
its i mposture.

·

Bureaucratic capitalism has found its
legitimation i n : Marx. I am not referring
here to orthodox Marxism's d ubious merit of
h aving reinforced the neocapitalist structures
whose present reorganisation is an i mplicit
homage to Soviet totalitarianism; I am empha­
sising the extent to which Marx's most profound
analyses of alienation have been vulgarised in
the most commonplaqe facts, which, stripped of
their magical veil and materialised in each ges­
ture, have become the sole substance, day after
day, of the lives of an increasing number of peo­
ple. In a word, bureaucratic capitalism contains
the palpable reality of alienation; it has brought
it home to everybody far more successfully than
Marx could ever have hoped to do, it has
banalised it as the diminishing of material
poverty has been accompanied by a spreading
mediocrity of existence. As poverty has been
reduced in terms of mere material survival, it has
become more .profound in terms of our way of
life - this is at least one widespread feeling that
exonerates Marx from all the interpretations a
degenerate Bolshevism has derived from him.
The "theory" of peaceful coexistence has accel­
erated such an awareness and revealed, to
those who were still .confused, that exploiters
can get along quite well with each other despite
their spectacular d ivergences.

1

2

"Any act," writes Mircea Eliade, "can
become a religious act. Human existence
is realised simultaneously on two parallel
planes, that of temporality, becoming, illusion,
and that of eternity, substance, reality." In the
n ineteenth century the brutal divorce of these
two planes demonstrated that power would
have done better to have maintained reality in a
mist of divine transcendence. But we m ust give
reformism credit for succeeding where
Bonaparte had failed, in dissolving becoming in
eternity and reality in. illusion; this union may
not be as solid as the sacraments of religious
marriage, but it is lasting, which is the most the
managers of coexistence and social peace can
ask of it. This is also what leads us to define our­
selves - in the illusory but inescapable perspec­
tive of duration - as the end of abstract tempo­
rality, as the end of the reified time of our acts;
to define ourselves - does it have to be spelled

out? - at the positive pole of alienation as the
end of social alienation, as the end of humani­
ty's term of social alienation.

3

The socialisation of primitive human
groups reveals a will to struggle more
effectively against the mysterious and terrifying
forces of nature. But struggling in the natural
environment, at once with it and against it, sub­
mitting to its most inhuman laws in order to
wrest from it an increased chance of survival doing this could only engender a more evolved
form of aggressive defence, a more complex and
less primitive attitude, manifesting on a higher
level the contradictions that the uncontrolled
and yet influenceable forces of nature never
ceased to impose. In becoming socialised, the
struggle against the blind domination of nature
triumphed inasmuch as it gradually assimilated
primitive, natural alienation, but in another
form. Alienation became social in the fight
against natural alienation. Is it by chance that a
technological civilisation has developed to such
a point that social alienation has been revealed
by its conflict with the last areas of natural
resistance that technological power hadn't man­
aged (and for good reasons) to subjugate?
Today the technocrats propose to put an end to
primitive alienation: with a stirring humanitari­
anism they exhort us to perfect the technical
means that "in themselves" would enable us to
conquer death, suffering, discomfort and bore­
dom. But to get rid of death would be less of a
miracle than to get rid of suicide and the desire
to die. There are ways of abolishing the death
penalty than can make one miss it. Until now the
specific use of technology - or more generally
the socioeconomic context in which human
activity is confined - while q uantitatively reduc­
ing the number of occasions of pain and death,
has allowed death itself to eat like a cancer into
the heart of each person's life.

I• 1 The prehistoric food-gathering age was
-r succeeded by the h u nting age d u ring

which clans formed and strove to increase their
chances of survival. Hunting grounds and
reserves were staked out from which outsiders
were absolutely excluded since the welfare of
the whole clan depended on its maintaining its

territory. As a result, the freedom gained by set­
tling down more comfortably in the natural envi­
ronment, and by more effective protection
against its rigors, engendered its own negation
outside the boundaries laid down by the clan
and forced the group to moderate its customary
rules in organising its relations with excluded
and threatening groups. From the moment it
appeared, socially constituted economic sur·
vival implied the existence of bound aries,
restrictions, conflicting rights. lt should never be
forgotten that until now both history and our
own nature have developed in accordance with
the movement of privative appropriation: the
seizing of control by a class, group, caste or indi·
vidual of a general power over socioeconomic
survival whose form remains complex . - from
ownership of land, territory, factories or capital,
all the way to the "pure" exercise of power over
people (hierarchy). Beyond the struggle against
regimes whose vision of paradise is a cybernetic
welfare state lies the necessity of a still greater
struggle against a fundamental and initially nat­
ural state of things, in the development of which
capitalism plays only an incidental, transitory
role; a state of things which will only disappear
when the last traces of hierarchical power disap­
pear - along with the "swine of humanity;' of
course.

5

To be an owner is to arrogate a good from
whose enjoyment one excludes other
people - while at the same time recognising
everyone's abstract right to possession. By
excluding people from the real right of owner·
ship, the owner extends his dominion over those
he has excluded (absolutely over non-owners,
relatively over other owners), without whom h e
is nothing. The non-owners have no choice i n the
matter. The owner appropriates and alienates
them as producers of his own power, while the
necessity of ensuring their own physical exis­
tence forces them in spite of themselves to col­
laborate in producingtheir own exclusion and to
s urvive without ever being a b le to live.
Excluded, they participate in possession
through the mediation of the owner, a mystical
participation characterising from the outset all
the clan and social relationships that gradually
replaced the principle of obligatory cohesion in

which each member was a n integral part of the
gro u p ("organic interdependence"). Their guar­
antee of survival depends on their activity with­
in the framework of privative a ppropriation.
They reinforce a right to property from which
they are excluded. Due to this ambiguity each of
them sees himself as participating in ownership,
as a living fragment of the right to possess, and
this belief in turn reinforces his condition as
excluded and possessed. (Extreme cases of this
alienation: the faithful slave, the cop, the body­
guard, the centurion - creatures who, through a
sort of union with their own death, confer on
death a power equal to the forces of life and
identify in a destructive energy the negative and
positive poles of alienation, the absolutely sub­
missive slave and the absolute master.) lt is of
vital importance to the exploiter that this
appearance is maintained and made more
sophisticated; not because he is especially
m achiavellian, but simply because he wants to
stay alive. The organisation of appearance is
bound to the survival of his privileges and to the
physical su rvival of the non-owner, who can thus
remain alive while being exploited and excluded
from being a person. Privative appropriation and
domination are thus originally imposed and felt
as a positive right, but in the form of a negative
u n iversality. Valid for everyone, j ustified in
everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the
right of privative appropriation is objectified in a
general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in
an essential law under which everyone individu­
ally manages to tolerate the more or less narrow
limits assigned to his right to live and to the con­
ditions of life in general.

6

In this social context the function of alien­
ation must be understood as a condition
of survival The labour of the non-owners is sub�
ject to the same contradictions as the right of
privative appropriation. lt transforms them into
possessed beings, into producers of their own
expropriation and exclusion, but it represents
the only chance of survival for slaves, for serfs,
for workers so m uch so that the activity that
allows their existence to continue by em ptying it
of all content ends up, through a natural and sin­
ister reversal of perspective, by taking on a pos­
itive sense. Not only has value been attributed
•

to work (in its form of sacrifice in the ancien
regime, in its brutalising aspects in bourgeois
ideology and in the so-called People's
Democracies), but very early on to work for a
master, to alienate oneself willingly, became the
honourable and scarcely questioned price of
survivaL The satisfaction of basic needs remains
the best safeguard of alienation; it is best dis­
simulated by being justified on the grounds of
undeniable necessities. Alienation multiplies
needs because it can satisfy none of them;
nowadays lack of satisfaction is measured in the
number of cars, refrigerators, TVs: the alienating
objects have lost the ruse and mystery of tran­
scendence, they are there in their concrete
poverty. To be rich today is to possess the great­
est number of poor objects.
Up to now surviving has prevented us from
living. This is why much is to be expected of the
increasingly evident impossibility of survival, an
impossibility which will become all the more evi­
dent as the glut of conveniences and elements
of survival reduces life to a single choice: suicide
or revolution.

7

The sacred presides even over the strug­
gle against alienation. As soon as the
relations of exploitation and the violence that
underlies them are no longer concealed by the
mystical veil, there is a breakthrough, a moment
of clarity, the struggle against alienation is sud­
denly revealed as a ruthless hand-to-hand fight
with naked power, power exposed in its brute
force and its weakness, a vulnerable giant
whose slightest wound confers on the attacker
the infamous notoriety of an Erostratus. Since
power survives, the event remains ambiguous.
Praxis of destruction, sublime moment when the
complexity of the world becomes tangible,
transparent, within everyone's grasp; inexpiable
revolts - those of the slaves, the Jacques, the
iconoclasts, the Enrages, the Communards,
Kronstadt, the Asturias, and - promises of things
to come - the hooligans of Stockholm and the
wildcat strikes ... only the destruction of all hier­
archical power will allow us to forget these. We
ai m to make sure it does.
The deterioration of mythical structures and
their slowness in regeneratin g themselves,
which make possible the awakening of con-

sciousness and the critical penetration of insur­
rection, are also responsible for the fact that
once the "excesses" of revolution are past, the
struggle against alienation is grasped on a theo­
retical plane, subjected to an "analysis" that is a
carryover from the demystification preparatory
to revolt. lt is at this point that the truest and
most authentic aspects of a revolt are re-exam­
ined and repudiated by the "we didn't really
mean to do that" of the theoreticians charged
with explaining the meaning of an insurrection
to those who made it - to those who aim to
demystify by acts, not just by words.
All acts contesting power call for analysis and
tactical development. Much can be expected of:
a) the new proletariat, which is discover­
ing its destitution amidst consumer abun­
dance (see the development of the work­
ers' struggles presently qegi n n i n g in
England, and the attitudes of rebellious
youth in all the modern countries);
b) countries that have had enough of
their partial, sham revolutions and are
consigning their past and present theo­
rists to the museums (see the role of the
intelligentsia in the Eastern bloc);
c) the Third World, whose mistrust of
technological myths has been kept alive
by the colonial cops and mercenaries, the
last, over-zealous m ilitants of a transcen­
dence against which they are the best
possible vaccination;
d) the force of the SI ("our ideas are i n
everyone's m i nd"), capable o f forestalling
remote-controll e d
revolts,
"crystal
nights" and sheepish resistance.

8

Privative appropriation is bound to the
dialectic of particular and generaL In the
m ystical realm where the contradictions of the
slave and feudal systems are resolved, the non­
owner, excluded as a particular individual from
the right of possession, strives to ensure his sur­
vival through his labour: the more he identifies
with the interests of the master, the more suc­
cessful he is. He knows the other non-owners
only through their common plight: the compul­
sory surrender of their labour power
(Christianity recommended voluntary surrender:
once the slave "willingly" offered his labour

E

power, he ceased to be a slave), the search for
the optimum conditions of survival, and mystical
identification. Struggle, though born of a univer­
sal will to survive, takes place on the level of
appearance where it brings into play identifica·
tion with the desires of the master and thus
introduces a certain individual rivalry that
reflects the rivalry between the masters.
Competition develops on this plane as long as
the relations of exploitation remain dissimulat·
ed behind a mystical o pacity and as long as the
conditions producing this opacity continue to
exist; as long as the degree of slavery d eter­
mines the slave's consciousness of the degree of
lived reality. (We are still at the stage of calling
"objective consciousness" what is in reality the
consciousness of being an object.) The owner,
for his part, depends on the general acknowl­
edgment of a right from which he alone is not
excluded, but which is seen on the plane of
appearance as a right accessible to each of the
excluded taken individually. His privileged posi­
tion depends on such a belief, and this belief is
also the basis for the strength that is essential if
he is to hold his own among the other owners; it
is his strength. If, in his turn, he seems to
renounce exclusive appropriation of everything
and everybody, if he poses less as a master than
as a servant of public good and defender of col·
lective security, then his power is crowned with
glory and to his other privileges he adds that of
denying, on the level of appearance (which is
the only level of reference in unilateral commu­
nication), the very notion of personal appropria­
tion; he denies that anyone has this right, he
repudiates the other owners. In the feudal per·
spective the owner is not integrated into appear­
ance in the same way as the non-owners, slaves,
soldiers, functionaries, servants of all kinds. The
lives of the latter are so squalid that the majori·
ty can live only as a caricature of the Master(the
feudal lord, the prince, the major-domo, the
taskmaster, the high priest, God, Satan ) . But
t he master himself is also forced to play one of
these caricatural roles. He can do so without
much effort since his pretension to total life is
already so caricatural, isolated as he is among
those who can only survive. He is already one of
our own kind (with the added grandeur of a past
epoch, which adds an exquisite savour to his

·

.••

sadness); he, like each of us, was anxiously
seeking the adventure where he could find him·
self on the road to his total perdition. Could the
master, at the very moment he alienates the oth·
ers, see that he reduces them to dispossessed
and excluded beings, and thus realise that he is
only an exploiter, a purely negative being? Such
an awareness is u nlikely and would be danger·
ous. By extending his dominion over the great­
est possible n u mber of s u bjects, isn't he
enabling them to survive, giving them their only
chance of salvation? ("Whatever would happen
to the workers if the capitalists weren't kind
enough to em ploy them?" the high-minded
souls of the nineteenth century liked to ask.) In
fact, the owner officially excludes himself from
all claim to privative appropriation. To the sacri­
fice of the non- owner, who through his labour
exchanges his real life for an apparent one (thus
avoiding immediate death by allowing the mas­
ter to determine his variety of living death), the
owner replies by appearing to sacrifice his
nature as owner and exploiter; he excludes him­
self mythically, he puts himself at the service of
everyone and of myth (at the service of God and
his people, for example). With an additional ges­
ture, with an act whose gratuitousness bathes
him in an otherworldly radiance, he gives renun­
ciation its pure form of mythical reality, rehounc·
ing common life, he is the poor man amidst illu­
sory wealth, he who sacrifices himself for every·
one while all the other people only sacrifice
themselves fot their own sake, for the sake of
their s urvival. He turns his predicament into
prestige. The more powerful he is the greater his
sacrifice. He becomes the living reference point
of the whole illusory life, the highest attainable
point in the scale of mythical values.
"Voluntarily" withdrawn from common mortals,
he is d rawn toward the world of the gods, and
his more or less established participation i n
divinity, o n the level o f appearance (the only
generally acknowledged frame of reference),
consecrates his rank in the hie ra rc h y of the other
owners. I n the organisation of transcendence
the feudal lord and, through osmosis, the own­
ers of some power or production materials, in
varying degrees · is led to play the principal role,
the �ole that he really does p lay in the economic
organisation of the group's s urvival. As a result,
•

·

EST DAN5 Lt\RUE

the existence of the group is bound on every
level to the existence of the owners as such, to
those who, owning everything because they own
everybody, also force everyone to renounce their
lives on the pretext of the owners' unique,
absolute and divine renunciation. (From the god
Prometheus punished by the gods to the god
Christ punished by men, the sacrifice of the
Owner becomes vulgarised, it loses its sacred
aura, is humanised.) Myth thus u nites owner
and non-owner, it envelops them in a common
form in which the necessity of survival, whether
merely physical or as a privileged being, forces
them to live on the level of appearance and of
the inversion of real life, the inversion of the life
of everyday praxis. We are still there waiting to
· live a life less than or beyond a mystique against
which our every gesture protests while submit·
ting to it.

9

Myth, the unitary absolute in which the
contradictions of the world find an illuso­
ry resolution, the harmonious and constantly
harmonised vision that reflects and reinforces
order · this is the sphere of the sacred, the extra­
h uman zone where an abundance of revelations
are manifested but where the revelation of the
process of privative appropriation is carefully
suppressed. Nietzsche saw this when he wrote,
"All becoming is a criminal revolt from eternal
being and its price is death." When the bour­
geoisie claimed to replace the p u re Being of feu­
dalism with Becoming, all it really did was to
desacralise Being and resacralise Becoming to
its own profit; it elevated its own Becoming to
the status of Being, no longer that of absolute
ownership but rather that of relative appropria­
tion: a petty democratic and mechanical
Becoming, with its notions of progress, merit
and causal succession. The owner's life hides
him from himself; bound to myth by a life and
death pact, he cannot see himself in the positive
and exclusive enjoyment of any good except
through the lived experience of his own exclu­
sion. (And isn't it through this mythical exclu­
sion that the non-owners will come to grasp the
reality of their own exclusion?) H e bears the
responsibility for a group, h e takes on the bur­
den of a god. Submitting himself to its benedic·
tioh and its retribution, he swathes himself in

austerity and wastes away. Model of gods and ·
heroes, the master, the owner, is the true reality
of Prometheus, of Christ, of all those whose
spectacular sacrifice has made it possible for
"the vast majority of people" to continue to sac­
rifice themselves to the extreme minority, to the
masters. (Analysis of the owner's sacrifice ·
should be worked out more s ubtly: isn't the case
of Christ really the sacrifice of the owner's son?
If the owner can never sacrifice himself except
on the level of appearance, then Christ stands
for the real immolation of the owner's son when
circumstances leave no other alternative. As a
son he is only an owner at a very early stage of
development, an embryo, little more than a
dream of future ownership. In this rhythic dim en·
sion belongs Bam�s· well-known remark in 1914
when war had arrived and made his dreams
come true at last: "Our youth, as is proper, has
gone to shed torrents of our blood.") This rather
distasteful little game, before it became trans­
formed into a symbolic rite, l<new a heroic peri­
od when kings and tribal chiefs were ritually put
to death according to their "will." Historians
assure us that these august martyrs were soon
replaced by prisoners, slaves or criminals. They
may not get hurt any more, but they've kept the
halo.
The concept of a common fate is based
on the sacrifice of the own�er and the
non-owner. Put another way, the notion of a
human condition is based on an ideal and tor­
mented image whose function is to resolve the
irresolvable opposition between the mythical
sacrifice of the m inority and the really sacrificed
life of everyone else. The function of myth is to
unify and eternalise, in a succession of static
moments, the dialectic of "will-to-live" and its
opposite. This universally dominant factitious
unity attains its most tangible and concrete rep­
resentation in comm unication, particularly in
language. Ambiguity is most manifest at this
level, it leads to an absence of real com munica­
tion, it puts the analyst at the mercy of ridicu­
lous phantoms, atthe mercy of words eternal
and changing instants - whose content varies
according to who pronounces them, as does. the
notion of sacrifice. When language is put to the
test, it can no longer dissimulate the misrepre-

10

•

· sentation and thus it provokes the crisis of par­

ticipation. In the language of an era one can fol­
low the traces of total revolution, unfulfilled but
always imminent. They are the exalting and ter­
rifying signs of the upheavals they foreshadow,
but who takes them seriously? The discredit
striking language is as deeply rooted and
instinctive as the suspicion with which myths
are viewed by people who at the same time
remain firmly attached to them. How can key
words be defined by other words? How can
phrases be used to point out the signs that
refute the phraseological organisation of
appearance? Th·e best texts still await their justi·
fication. When a poem by Mallarme becomes the
sole explanation for an act of revolt, then poetry
and revolution will have overcome their ambigu·
ity. To await and prepare for this moment is to
manipulate information not as the last shock
wave whose significance escapes everyone, but
as the first repercussion of an act still to come.

��

Born of man's will to survive the uncon·
trollable forces of nature, myth is a pub­
lic welfare policy that has outlived its necessity.
t has consolidated its tyrannical force by reduc­
ing life to the sole dimension of survival, by
egating it as movement and totality.
When contested, myth homogenises the diverse
attacks on it; sooner or later it engulfs and
assimilates them. Nothing can withstand it, no
mage or concept that attempts to destroy the
dominant spiritual structures. lt reigns over the
expression of facts and lived experience, on
hich it imposes its own interpretive structure
(dramatisation). Private consciousness is the
tonsciousness of lived experience that finds its
�xpression on the level of organised appear·
ance.
Myth is sustained by .rewarded sacrifice.
Since every individual life is based on its own
renunciation, .lived experience must be defined
as sacrifice and recompense. As a reward for his
asceticism, the initiate (the promoted worker,
the specialist, the manage r - new martyrs canon­
sed democratically) is granted a niche in the
organisation of appearance; he is made to feel
at home in alienation. But collective shelters
disappeared with unitary societies, all that's left
' is their later concrete embodiments for the ben·

j

i
p
i

w

i
!
!
j

efit of the public: temples, churches, palaces...
memories of a universal protection. Shelters are
private nowadays, and even if their protection is
far from certain there can be no mistaking their
price.

12

" Private" life is defined primarily in a
formal context. lt is, to be sure, born out
of thJ social relations created by privative
appropriation, but its essential form is deter·
mined by the expression of those relations.
U niversal, incontestable but constantly contest·
ed, this form makes appropriation a right
belonging to everyone and from which everyone
is excluded, a right one can obtain only by
renouncing it. As long as it fails to break free of.
the context imprisoning it (a break that is called
revolution), the most authentic experience can
be grasped, expressed and communicated only
by way of an inversion through which its funda·
mental contradiction is dissimulated. In other
words, if a positive project fails to sustain a prax·
is of radically overthrowing the conditions of life
· which are nothing other than the conditions of
privative appropriation - it does not have the
slightest chance of escaping being taken over by
the negativity that reigns over the expression of
social relationships: it is recuperated like the
image in a mirror, in inverse perspective. In the
totalising perspective in which it conditions the
whole of everyone's life, and in which its real
and its mythic power can no longer be distin­
guished (both being both real and mythical), the
process of privative appropriation has made it
impossible to express life any way except nega­
tively. Life in its entirety is suspended in a nega­
tivity that corrodes it and formally defines it. To
talk of life today is like talking of rope in the
house of a hanged man. Since the key of will-to·
live has been lost we have been wandering in
the corridors of an endless mausoleum. The dia·
logue of chance and the throw of the dice no
longer suffices to justify our lassitude; those
who still accept living in well-furnished weari·
ness picture themselves as leading an indolent
existence while failing to notice in each of their
daily gestures a living denial of their despair, a
denial that should rather make them despair
only of the poverty of their imagination.
Forgetting life, one can identify with a range of

·

'1

C 'EST

J� PA RTI CI P£R

�� PARTICI PATION
: S U tC I D[ '

(QNSEIL r£Dffi�L.Rf.l

images, from the brutish conqueror and brutish
slave at one pole to the saint and the pure hero
at the other. The air in this shithouse has been
unbreathable for a long time. The world and man
as representation stink like carrion and there's
no longer any god around to turn the charnel
houses into beds of lilies. After all the ages men
have died while accepting without notable
change the explanations of gods, of nature imd
of biologic al laws, it wouldn't seem unreason­
able to ask if we don't die because so much
death enters - and for very specific reasons - into
every moment of our lives.

13

-�

Privative appropriation can be defined
notably as the appropriation of things
by means of the appropriation of people. ltis the
spring and the troubled water where all reflec­
tions mingle and blur. Its field of action and
influence, spanning the whole of history, seems
to have been characterised until now by a fun­
damental double behavioural determination: an
ontology based on sacrifice and negation of self
(its subjective and objective aspects respective­
ly) and a fundamental duality, a division
between particular and general, individual and
collective, private and public, theoretical and
practical, spiritual and material, intellectual and
manual, etc. The contradiction between univer­
sal appropriation and universal expropriation
implies that the master has been seen for what
he is and isolated. This mythical image of terror,
want and renunciation presents itself to slaves,
to servants, to all those who can't stand living as
they do; it is the illusory reflection of their par­
ticipation in property, a natural illusion since
they really do participate in it through the daily
sacrifice of their energy (what the ancients
called pain or torture and we call labour or work)
since they themselves produce this property in a
way that excludes them. The master can only
cling to the . notion of work-as-sacrifice, like
Christ to his cross and his nails; it is up to him to
authenticate sacrifice, to apparently renounce
his right to exclusive enjoyment and to cease to
expropriate with purely human violence (that is,
violence without mediation). The sublimity of
the gesture obscures the initial violence, the
nobility of the sacrifice absolves the commando,
the brutality of the conqueror is bathed in the

light of a transcendence whose reign is inter­
nalised, the gods are the intransigent guardians
of rights, the irascible shepherds of a peaceful
and law-abiding flock of "Being and Wanting-To­
Be Owner.'' The gamble on transcendence and
the sacrifice it implies are the masters' greatest
conquest, their most accomplished submis ion
to the necessity of conq u est. Anyone who
intrigues for power while refusing the purifica­
tion of renunciation (the brigand or the tyrant)
will sooner or later be tracked down and killed
like a mad dog, or worse: as someone who nly
pursues his own ends and whose blunt concep­
tion of "work" lacks any tact toward others' feel­
ings: Troppmann, Landru, Petiot, murde�ing
people without justifying it in the name: of
defending the Free World, the Christian West,
the State or Human Dignity, were doomed. to
ev.e ntual defeat. By refusing to play the rules of
the game, pirates, gangsters and outlaws dis­
turb those with good consciences (whose c'on­
sciences are a reflection of myth), but the rnas­
ters, by killing the encroacher or enrolling him
as a cop, re-establish the omnipotence of "eter­
nal truth": those who don't sell themselves lose
their right to survive and those who do sell
themselves lose their right to live. The sacrifice
of the master is the matrix of humanism, which
is what makes humanism - and let this be under"
stood once and for all the miserable negatior:J of
everything human. Humanism is the master
taken seriously at his own game, acclaimed' by
those who see in his apparent sacrifice - that
caricatural reflection of their real sacrifice - a
reason to hope for salvation. justice, dignity,
nobility, freedom ... these words that yap and
howl, are they anything other than household
pets whose masters have calmly awaited their
homecoming since the time when heroic lackeys
won the right to walk them on the streets? To
use them is to forget that they are the ballast
that enables power to rise out of reach. And if we
imagine a regime deciding that the mythical sac­
rifice of the masters should not be promoted in
such universal forms, and setting abouttracking
down these word-concepts and wiping them out,
we could well expect the Left to be incapable of
combating it with anything more than a plaintive
battle of words whose every phrase, invoking
the "sacrifice" of a previous master, calls for an

�

9

equally mythical sacrifice of a new one (a leftist
master, a power mowing down workers in the
name of the proletariat). Bound to the notion of
sacrifice, humanism is born of the common fear
of masters and slaves: it is nothing but the soli·
darity of a shit-scared humanity. But those who
reject all hierarchical power can use any word as
a weapon to pu nctuate their action.
Lautreamont and the illegalist anarchists were
already aware of this; so were the dadaists.
The appropriator thus becomes an owner
from the moment he puts the ownership of peo­
ple and things in the hands of God or of some
uniyersal transcendence whose omnipotence is
reflj!cted back on him as a grace sanctifying his
slig�test gesture; to oppose an owner thus con­
sec ated is to oppose God, nature, the father­
tan , the people. In short, to exclude oneself
fro T the physical and spiritual world. "We must
nei�her govern nor be governed," writes Marcel
Havrenne so neatly. For those who add an appro­
priate violence to his humour, there is no longer
any salvation or damnation, no place in the uni·
versal order, neither with Satan, the great recu­
perator of the faithful, nor in any form of myth
since they are the living proof of the uselessness
of all that. They were born for a life yet to be
invented; insofar as they lived, it was on this
hope that they finally came to grief.
Two corollaries of singularisation in transcendence:
a) If ontology implies transcendence, it is
clear that any ontology automatically jus­
tifies the being of the master and the
hierarchical power wherein the master is
reflected in degraded, more or less faith·
ful images.
b) Over the distinction between manual
and intellectual work, between practice
and theory, is superimposed the distinc­
tion between work-as-real-sacrifice and
the organisation of work in the form of
apparent sacrifice.
lt would be tempting to explain fascism
among other reasons for it · as an act of faith,
the auto-da-fe of a bourgeoisie haunted by the
murder of God and the destruction .of the great
sacred spectacle, dedicating itself to the devil,
to an inverted mysticism, a black mysticism with
its rituals and its holocausts. Mysticism and

high finance.
lt should not be forgotten that hierarchical
power is inconceivable without transcendence,
myths.
without
ideologies,
without
Demystification itself can always be turned into
a myth: it suffices to "omit," most philosophical·
ly, demystification by acts. Any demystification
so neutralised, with the sting taken out of it,
becomes painless, euthanasic, in a word,
humanitarian. Except that the movement of
demystification will ultimately demystify the
demystifiers.

11•

t
�

•

·

By directly attacking the mythical
... organisation of appearance, the bour­
geois revolutions, in spite of themselves,
attacked the weak point not only of unitary
power but of any hierarchical power whatsoever.
Does this unavoidable mistake explain the guilt
complex that is one of the dominant traits of
bourgeois mentality? In any case, the mistake
was undoubtedly inevitable.
lt was a mistal<e because once the cloud of
lies dissimulating privative appropriation was
pierced, myth was shattered, leaving a vacuum
that could be filled only by a delirious freedom
and a splendid poetry. Orgiastic poetry, to be
sure, has not yet destroyed power. Its failure is
easily explained and its ambiguous signs reveal
the blows struck at the same time as they heal
the wounds. And yet · let us leave the historians
and aesthetes to their collections - one has only
to pick at the scab of memory and the cries,
words and gestures of the past make the whole
body of power bleed again. The whole organisa­
tion of the survival of memories will not prevent
them from dissolving into oblivion as they come
to life; just as our survival will dissolve in the
construction of our everyday life.
And it was an inevitable process: as Marx
showed, the appearance of exchange-value.and
its symbolic representation by money opened a
profound latent crisis in the heart of the unitary
world. The commodity introduced into human
relationships a universality (a 1ooo-franc note
represents anything I can obtain for that sum)
and an egalitarianism (equal things are
exchanged). This "egalitarian universality" par­
tially escapes both the exploiter and the exploit·
ed, but they recognise each other through it.

·

They find themselves face to face confronting
each other no longer within the mystery of
divine birth and ancestry, as was the case with
the nobility, but within an intelligible transcen·
dence, the Logos, a body of laws ttiat can be
understood by everyone, even if such under·
standing remains cloaked in mystery.
A mystery with its i nitiates: first of all
priests struggling to maintain the Logos in the
limbo of divine mysticism, but soon yielding to
philosophers and then to technicians both their
positions and the dign ity of their sacred mission.
From Plato's Republic to the Cybernetic State.
Thus, under the pressure of exchange-value and
technology (generally available mediation),
myth was gradually secu larised. Two facts
should be noted, however:
a) As the Logos frees itself from mystical
u nity, it affirms itself both within it and
against it. Upon magical and analogical
structures of behaviour are superim·
posed rational and logical ones which
negate the former while preserving them
(mathematicS, poetics, economics, aes·
thetics, psychology, etc.).
b) Each time the Logos, the "organisation
of intelligible appearance, becomes more
autonomous, it tends to break away from
the sacred and become fragmented. In
this way it presents a double d anger for
unitary power. We have already seen that
the sacred expresses power's seizure of
the totality, and that anyone wanting to
accede to the totality must do so through
the mediation of power: the interdict
against mystics, alchemists and gnostics
is sufficient proof of this. This also
explains why present,day powe� "pro·
tects" specialists (though without com·
pletely trusting them): it vaguely senses
that they are the missionaries of a
resacralised Logos. There are historical
signs that testify to the attempts made
within mystica�nitary power to found a
rival power asserting its unity in the name
ofthe Logos · Christian syncretism (which
.makes God psychologically explainable),
· the Renaissance, the Reformation and the
Enlightenment.
The masters who strove to maintain the

unity of the Logos were well aware that .
only unity can stabilise power. Examined
more closely, their efforts can be seen not
to have been as vain as the fragmentation
of the logos in the nineteenth and twen·
tieth centuries would seem to prove. ln
the general movement of atomisation the
Logos has been broken down into spe·
cialised tec h n iq ue s (physics, biology,
sociology, papyrology, etc.), but at the
same time the need to re-establish the
totality has become more imperative. lt
should not be forgotten that all it would
take would be an all-powerful technocrat·
ic power in order for there to be a totali·
tarian domination of the totality, for the
Logos to succeed myth as the seizure of
the totality by a future u n itary (cybernet·
ic) power. In such an event the vision of
the Encyclopedistes (strictly rationalised
p rogress stretching indefinitely into the
future) would have known only a two·cen·
tury postponement before being realised.
This is the direction in which the Stalino·
cyberneticians are preparing the future.
In this perspective, peaceful coexistence
should be seen as a preliminary step
toward a totalitarian u nity. lt is time
everyone realised that they are already
resisting it.

15

We know the battlefield. The problem
now is to .prepare for battle before the
pataphysidan, armed with his totality without
technique, and the cybernetician, armed with
his technique without totality, consummate their
political coitus.
From the standpoint of hierarchical power,
myth could be desacralised only if the Logos, or
at least its desacralising elements, were
resacralised. To attack the sacred was at the
same time s upposed to liberate the totality and
'
t hus d estroy power (we've heard that one
before!). B u t t h e power of t h e bourgeoisie · frag­
mented, i m poverished, constantly contested­
maintains a relative stability by relying on this
ambiguity: Technology, which objectively
desacralises, s ubjectively appears as an instru­
ment of liberation. Not a real liberation, which
could be attained only by cdesacralisation ' that

'.. :.{'Â·

is, by the end of the spectacle - but a caricature,
an imitation, an induced hallucination. What the
unitary vision of the world transferred into the
beyond (above) fragmentary powet pro-jects
('throws forward') into a state of future well·
being, of brighter tomorrows proclaimed from
atop the dunghill of today-tomorrows that are
nothing more than the present m u ltiplied by the
number of gadgets to be produced. From the
slogan " live in God" we have gone on to the ·
humanistic motto "Survive until you are old,"
euphemistically expressed as: "Stay young at
heart and you'll live a long time."
Once desacralised and fragmented, myth
loses its grandeur and its spirituality. lt becomes
an impoverished form, retaining its former char­
acteristics but revealing them in a concrete,
harsh, tangible fashion. God doesn't run the
show anymore, and until the day the logos
takes over with its arms of technology and sci­
ence, the phantoms of alienation will continue
to materialise and sow disorder everywhere.
Watch for them: they are the first symptoms of a
future order. We must start to play right now if
the future is not to become impossible (the
hypothesis of humanity destroying itself-and
with it obviously the whole experiment of con­
structing everyday life). The vital objectives of a
struggle for the construction of everyday life are
the sensitive key points of all hierarchical power.
To build one is to destroy the other. Caught in
the vortex of desacralisation and resacralisa­
tion, we stand essentially for the negation oft he
following elements the organisation of appear·
ance as a spectacle in which everyone d enies
himself, the separation on which private life is
based, since it is there that the o bjective separa­
tion between owners and dispossessed is lived
and reflected on every level and sacrifice These
three elements are obviously interdependent,
just as are their opposites: participation, com­
mu nication, realisation. The same applies to
their context nontotality (a bankrupt world, a
co n t rol l ed totality) a n d totality.

16

The human relationships that were formerly dissolved in divine transcen­
dence (the totality crowned by the sacred) set­
tled out and solidified as soon as the sacred
stopped acting as a catalyst. Their materiality

was revealed and, as the capricious laws of the
economy s ucceed those of Providence, the
power of men began to appear behind the power
of gods. Today a multitude of roles corresponds
tb the mythical role everyone once played under
the divine spotlight. Though their masks are
now h uman faces, these roles still require both
actors and extras to deny their real lives in
accordance with the dialectic of real and mythi­
cal sacrifice. The spectacle is nothing but
desacralised and fragmented myth. lt forms the
armour of a power (which could also be called
essential mediation) that becomes vulnerable to .
every blow once it no longer succeeds in dissim. ulating (in the cacophony where all cries drown
out each other and form an overall harmony) its
nature as privative appropriation, and the
greater or lesser dose of misery it allots to
everyone.
Roles have become i mpoverished within the
context of a fragmentary power eaten away by
desacralisation, just as the spectacle represents
an impoverishment in comparison with myth.
They betray its mech anisms and artifices so
clumsily that power, to defend itself against
popular denunciation of the spectacle, has no
other alternative than to itself take the initiative
in this denunciation by even more 'clumsily
changing actors or ministers, or by organising
pogroms of s upposed or prefabricated scape­
goat agents (agents of Moscow, Wall Street, the
) udeocracy or the Two Hundred Families). Which
also means thatthe whole cast has been forced
to become hams, that style has been replaced
by manner.
Myth, as an immobile totality, encompassed
all movement (consider pilgrimage, for example,
as fulfilment and adventure within immobility).
On the one hand, the spectacle can seize the
totality only by reducing itto a fragment and to
. a series of fragments (psychological; sociologi·
cal, biological, philological and mythological
world-views), while o n the other hand, it is situ­
ated at t h e p o i n t where the m ov e m e nt of
desacralisation converges with the efforts at
resacralisation. Thus it can succeed in imposing
immobility only within the real moveme nt, the
movement that changes it despite .its re,sistance.
In the era of fragmentation the organisation of
appearance makes movement a linear succes·

sion of immobile instants (this notch-to-notch
progression is perfectly exem plified by Stalinist
"Dialectical Materialism"). U nder what we have
called "the colonisation of everyday life," the
only possible changes are changes of fragmen·
tary roles. In terms of more or . less inflexible
conventi'ons, one is successively citizen, head of
f;imily, sexual partner, politician, specialist, pro·
fessional, producer, consumer. Yet what boss
doesn't himself feet bossed? The proverb
applies to everyone: You sometimes get a fuel<,
but you always get fucked!
The era of fragmentation has at least elimi·
nated all doubt on one point: everyday life is the
battlefield where the war between power and
the totality takes place, with power using all its
strength to control the totality.
What do we demand in. backing the power of
everyday life against hierarchical power? We
demand everything .We are taking our stand in
the generalised conflict stretching from domes·
tic squabbles to revolutionary war, and we have
gambled on the will to live. This means that we
must survive as aritisurvivors. Fundamentally we
are concerned only with the moments when life
breaks through the glaciation of survival
(whether these moments are unconscious or
theorised, .historical-like revolution-or person­
al). But we must recognise that we are also pre·
vented from freely following the course of such
moments (except for the moment of revolution
itself) not only by the general repression exert·
ed by power, but also by the exigencies of our
own struggle, our own tactics, etc. lt is also
important to find the means of compensating for
this additional "margin of error" by widening the
scope of these moments and demovstrating
their qualitative significance. What prevents
what we say on the construction of everyday life
from being recuperated by the c u ltural estab·
lishment (Arguments, academic thinkers with
paid vacations) is the fact that all situationist
ideas are nothing other than faithful develop·
ments of acts attempted constantly by thou­
sands of people to try and prevent another day
from being no more than twenty�four hours of
wasted time. Are we an avant·garde? If so, to be
avant·garde !)leans to move in step with reality.
•

17

lt's not the mono poly of intelligence
that
we. hold, but. that of its use. Our
.
position is strategic, we are a tthe heart of every
conflict The qualitative is our striking force.
People who half understand this journal ask us
for an explanatory monograph thanks to which
they will be able to convince themselves that
they are intelligent and cultured that is to say,
id iots. Someone who gets exasperated and
chucks it in the gutter is making a more mean·
ingful gesture. Sooner or later it will have to be
understood that the words and phrases we use
are still lagging behind reality. The distortion
and clumsiness in the way we express ourselves
(which a man of taste called, not inaccurately, "a
rather irritating kind of hermetic terrorism")
comes from our central position, our position on
· the ill-defined and shifting frontier where lan­
guage captured by power (conditioning) and
free language (poetry) fight out their infinitely
complex war. To those who follow behind us we
prefer those who reject us impatiently because
our language is not yet authentic poetry-the free
construction of everyday life.
Everything related to thought i s . related to
the spectacle. Almost everyone lives in a state of
terror at the possibility that they might awake to
themselves, and their fear is deliberately fos·
tered by power. Conditioning, the special poetry
of power, has extended its dominion so far (all
material equipment belongs to it: press, televi­
sion, stereotypes, magic, tradition, economy,
technology what we call captured language)
that it has almost succeeded in dissolving what
Marx called the undominated sector, replacing it
with another dominated one (see below our
composite portrait of "the s urvivor"). But lived
ex perience cannot so easily be reduced to a sue·
cession of empty configurations Resistance to
the external organisation of life to the organisa­
tion of life as survival contains more poetry than
any volume of verse or prose and the poet in the
literary sense of the word is one who has at least
understood or felt this But such poetry is in . a
most dangerous situation Certainly poetry in the
situationist sense of the word is irreducible and
cannot be recuperated by power (as soon as an
act is recuperated it becomes a stereotype, con­
ditioning, language of power). But it is encircled
by power. Power encircles the irreducible and
•

PU L A I R E

holds it by isolating it; yet such isolation is
impracticable. The two pincers are, first; the
threat of disintegration (insanity, illness, desti­
tution, suicide), and second, remote-controlled
therapeutics. The first grants death, the second
grants no more than survival (empty communi·
cation, the company of family or friendship, psy­
choanalysis in the service of alienation, medical
care, ergotherapy). Sooner or later the SI must
define itself as a therapy: we are ready todefend
the poetry made by all against the false poetry
rigged up by power (conditioning). Doctors and
psychoanalysts better get it straight too, or they
may one day, along with architects and other
apostles of survival, have to take the conse­
quences for what they have done.

Everyone is asked their op1mon about every
detail in order to prevent them from having one
about the totality. However clumsy this maneou­
vre may be, it might have worked if the salesmen
in charge of peddling it from door to door were
not themselves waking up to their own alien­
ation. To the passivity imposed on the dispos­
sessed masses is added the growing passivity of
the directors and actors su bjected .to the
abstract laws of the market and the spectacle
and exercising less and less real power over the
world. Already signs of revolt are appearing
among the actors - stars who· try to escape pub'
licity or rulers who criticise their own power;
Brigitte Bardot or Fidel Castro. The tools of
power are wearing out; their desire for their own
freedom should be taken into account.

18

All unresolved, unsuperseded antago·
nisms weaken. Such antagonisms can
evolve only by remaining impri!?oned in previous
unsuperseded forms (anticultural art in the cul­
tural spectacle, for example). Any radical oppo­
sition that fails or is partially successful (which
amounts to the same thing) gradually degener­
ates into reformist opposition. Fragmentary
oppositions are like the teeth on cogwheels,
they mesh with .each other and make the
machine go round, the machine of the spectacle,
the machine of power.
Myth maintained all . antagonisms within the
archetype of Manicheanism. But what can func­
tion as an archetype in a fragmented society? In
fact, the memory of previous antagonisms, pre­
sented in their obviously devalued and unag­
gressive form, appears today as the last attempt
to bring some coherence into the organisation of
appearance, so great is the extent to which the
spectacle has become a spectacle of confusion
and equivalences. We are ready to wipe out all
trace of these memories by harnessing all the
energy contained in previous antagonisms for a
radical struggle soon to come. All the springs
blocked by power will one day burst through to
form a torrent that will change the face of the
world.
In a caricature of antagonisms, power urges
everyone �o be for or against Brigitte Bardot, the
nouveau roman, the 4-horse Citroen, spaghetti,
mescal, miniskirts, the UN, the classics, nation·
alisation, thermonuclear war and hitchhiking.

19

At the very moment when slave revolt
threatened to overthrow the structure
of power and to reveal the relationship between
transcendence and the mechanism of privative
appropriation, Christianity appeared with its
grandiose reformism, whose central democratic
demand was for the slaves to accede not to the
reality of a human life which would have been
impossible without denouncing the exclusionary
aspect of privative appropriation · but rather to
the unreality of an existence whose source of
happiness is mythical (the imitation of Christ as
the price of the hereafter). What has changed?
Anticipation of the hereafter has become antici­
pation of a brighter tomorrow; the sacrifice of
real, immediate life is the price paid for the illu­
sory freedom of an apparent life. The spectacle
is the sphere where forced labour is transformed
into voluntary sacrifice. Nothing is more suspect
than the formula "To each according to · �is
work" in a world where work is the blackmail of
survival; to say nothing of the formula "To each
according to his needs" in a world where needs
are determined by power Any construction that
attempts to define itself autonomously and thus
partially, and does not take into account that it is
in fact defined by the negativity in which every­
thing is suspended enters into the reformist
project. lt is trying to build on quicksand as
though it were rock. Contempt and misunder­
standing of the context fixed by hierarchical
power can only end up reinforcing that context.
·

•

On the other hand, the spontaneous acts we can
see everywhere forming against power and its
spectacle must be warned of all the obstacles in
their path and must find a tactic taking into
account the strength ofthe enemy and its means
of recuperation. This tactic, which we are going
to popularise, is detournement.

20

Sacrifice must be rewarded. In
exchange for their real sacrifice the
workers receive the instruments of their libera­
tion (comforts gadgets) but this liberation is
purely fictitious since power controls the ways in
which all the material equipment can be used;
since power uses to its own ends both the
instruments and those who use them. The
Christian and bourgeois revolutions democra­
tised mythical sacrifice, the "sacrifice of the
master.'' Today there are countless initiates who
receive crumbs of power for putting to public
service the totality of their partial knowledge.
They are no longer called "initiates" and not yet
"priests of the logos"; they are simply known as
specialists.
On the level of the spectacle their power is
undeniable: the contestant on "Double Your
Money" and the postal clerk running on all day
about all the mechanical details of his car both
identify with the specialist, and we know how
production managers use such identification to
bring unskilled workers to heel. Essentially the
true . mission of the technocrats would be to
unify the logos; if only - because of one of the.
contradictions of fragmentary power - they
weren't so absurdly compartmentalised and iso­
lated. Each one is alienated in being out of
phase with the others; he knows the whole of
one .fragment and knows no realisation. What
real control can the atomic technician, the
strategist or the political specialist exercise over
a nuclear weapon? What ultimate control can
power hope to impose on all the gestures devel·
oping against it? The stage is so crowded that
only chaos reigns as master. "Order reigns and

doesn't govern" (IS #6).
To the extent that the specialist takes part in
the development of the instruments that condi­
tion and transform the world, he is preparing the
way for the revolt of the privileged. Until now
such revolt has been called fascism. lt is essen•

tially an operatic revolt didn't Nietzsche see
Wagner as a prj!cursor? - in which actors who
have been pushed aside for a long time and see
themselves as less and less free suddenly
demand to play the leading roles. Clinically
speaking, fascism is the hysteria of the spectac·
ular world pushed .to the point of paroxysm. I n
this paroxysm the spectacle momentarily
ensu res its unity while at the same time reveal­
ing its radical inh umanity. Through fascism and
Stalinism, which constitute its romantic crises,
the spectacle reveals its true nature: it is a dis·
ease.
We are poisoned by the s pectacle. All the
elements necessary for a detoxification (that is,
for the construction of our everyday lives) are in
the hands of specialists. We are thus highly
interested in all these specialists, but in differ­
ent ways. Some are hopeless cases: we are not,
for example, going to try and show the special­
ists of pQwer, the rulers, the extent of their delir·
ium. On the other hand, we are ready to take into
account the bitterness of specialists imprisoned
in roles that are constricted, absurd or ignomin·
ious. We must confess, however, that our indul·
gence has its limits. If in spite of all our efforts,
. they persist in putting their guilty conscience
and their bitterness in the service of power by
fabricating the conditioning that colonises their
own everyday lives; if they prefer an illusory rep­
resentation i n the hierarchy to true realisation; if
they persist in ostentatiously brandishing their
specialisations (their painting, their novels, their
equations, their sociometry, their psychoanaly­
sis, their ballistics); finally, if, knowing perfectly
well and soon ignorance of this fact will be no
excuse · that only power and the S I hold the key
to using their specialisation, they nevertheless
still choose to serve power because power, bat·
tening on their inertia, has chosen them to serve
it, then fuck them! No one could be more gener·
ous. They should understand all this and above
all the fact that henceforth the revolt of nonrul·
•

•

ing actors is linked to the revolt against the

spectacle (see below the thesis on the SI and
power).

21

The generalised anathematisation of
the lumpenproletariat stems from the
use to which it was put by the bourgeoisie,

which it served both as a regulating mechanism
for power and as a source of recruits for the
more dubious forces of order:. cops, informers,
hired thugs, artists ... Nevertheless, the lumpen­
proletariat e mbodies a remarkably radical
implicit critique of the society of work. Its open
contempt for both lackeys and bosses contains a
good critique of work as alienation, a critique
that has not been taken into consideration until
now because the lumpenproletariat was the sec­
tor of ambiguities, but also because during the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth the struggle against natural alienation
and the production of well-being still appeared
as valid justific ations for work.
Once it became known that the abundance
of consumer goods was nothing but the flip side
of alienation in production, the lumpenproletari­
at acquired a new dimension: it liberated a con­
tempt for organised work which, in the age of
the Welfare State, is gradually taking on the pro­
portions of a demand that only the rulers still
refuse to acknowledge. In spite of the constant
attempts of power to recuperate it, every exper­
iment carried out on everyday life, that is, every
attempt to construct it (an illegal activity since
the destruction of feudal power, where it was
limited arid restricted to a minority), is concre­
tised today through the critique of alienating
work and the refusal to submit to forced labour.
So much so that the new proletariat tends to
define itself negatively as a " Front Against
Forced Labour" bringing together all those who
resist recuperation by power. This defines our
field of action; it is here that we are gambling on
the ruse of history against the ruse of power; it
is here that we back the worker (whether steel­
worker or artist) who - consciously or not rejects organised work and life, against the
worker who - consciously or not - accepts work­
ing at the dictates of power. In this perspective,
it is not unreasonable to foresee a transitional
period during which automation and the will of
the new proletariat leave work solely to special­
ists, reducing managers and bureaucrats to the
rank of temporary slaves. In a generalised
automation the "workers," instead of supervis­
ing machines, could devote their attention to
watching over the cybernetic specialists, whose
sole task would be to increase a production

which, through a reversal of perspective, will
have ceased to be the priority sector, in order to
serve the priority of life over survival.

22

Unitary power strove to dissolve individual existence in a collective con­
sciousness so that each social unit subjectively
defined itself as a particle with a clearly deter­
mined W\!ight suspended as though in oil.
Everyo ne had to feel overwhelmed by the
omnipresent evidence that everything was
merely raw material in the. hands of God, who
used it for his own purposes, which were natu­
rally beyond individual human comprehension.
All phenomena were seen as emanations of a
supreme will; any abnormal divergence signified
some hidden meaning (any perturbation was
merely an ascending or descending path toward
harmony: the Four Reigns, the Wheel of Fortune,
trials sent by the gods). One can speak of a col­
lective consciousness in the sense that it was
simultaneously for each individual and for
everyone: consciousness of myth and con­
sciousness of particular-existence-within-myth.
The power of the illusion was such that authen­
tically lived life drew its meaning from what was
not authentically lived; from this stems that
priestly condemnation of life, the reduction of
life to pure contingency, to sordid materiality, to
vain appearance and to the lowest state of a
transcendence that became increasingly
degraded as it escaped mythical organisation.
God was the guarantor of space and time,
whose coordinates defined unitary society. He
was the common reference point for all men;
space and time came together in him just as in
him all beings became one with their destiny. In
the era of fragmentation, man is torn between a
time and a space that no transcendence can
unify through the mediation of any centralised
power. We are living in a space and time that are
out of joint, deprived of any reference point or
coordinate, as though we were never going to be
able to come into contact with ourselves,
although everything invites us to.
There is a place where you create yourself
and a time in which you play yourself. The space
of everyday life, that of one's true realisation, is
encircled by every form of conditioning. The nar­
row space of our true realisation defines us, yet

we define ourselves in the time. of the spectacle.
Or put another way: our consciousness is no
lo nger consciousness of myth and of part icu la r­
being-in-myth, but rather consciousness of the
spectacle and of particular-role-in-the"specta­
cle. (I pointed out above the relationship
between all ontology and unitary power; it
should be recalled here that the crisis of ontol­
ogy appears with the movement toward frag­
mentation.) Or to put it still another way: in the
space-time relation in which everyone and
everything . is situated, time has become the
imaginary (the field of identifications) ; space
defines us, although we define ourselves in the
imaginary and although the imaginary defines
us qua subjectivlties.
Our free d o m isthat of an abstract temporal­
ity in which . we are .named in the language of
power (these names are the roles assigned to
us), with a choice left to us to find officially
recognised synonyms for ourselves. In contrast,
the space ofour authentic realisation (the space
of our everyday life) is under the dominion of
silence. There is no name to name the space of
lived experience except in poetry, in language
liberating itself from the domination of power.

us is to become spectators of the gangrene and
decay, spectators of survival.
The drama of consciousness to which He gel
referred is actually the consciousness of drama.
Romanticism resounds like the cry of the soul
torn from the body, a suffering all the more acute
as each of us finds himself alone in facing the
fall of the sacred totality and of all the Houses of
Usher.

2 1• . The totality is objective reality, in the

· By desacralising and fragmenting myth,
23

·

.

the bourgeoisie was led to demand first
of all independence of consciousness (demands
for freedom of thought, freedom of. the press,
freedom of research; rejection of dogma).
Conscioilsnes� thus ceased being more or less
consciousness- reflecting-myth. lt became con­
sciousness of successive roles played w ithin the
spectacle. What the bourgeoisie demanded
above all was the freedom of actors and extras in
a. spectacle
. no longer organised by God; his cops
and his priests, . but by natural and economic
laws; "capricious and inexorable laws" defend­
ed by a . new team of cops and specialists.
God has been torn off like a useless bandage arid the wound has stay ed raw. The bandage
may have prevented the ·wound from . healing,
but it justified suffering, it gave it a meaning well
worth a few ·shots of morphine. Now-suffering
has no justification whatsoever · and morphine is
far from cheap. Separa tion has become· con­
crete. Anyone at all can put their finger on it,- and
the only answer cybernetic society has to offer

•

-r movement of which su bjectivity can
participate only. in the form of realisation.
Anything separate from the realisation of every­
-day life rejoins the spectacle where survival is
frozen (hibernation) and served out in slices.
There can be no authentic realisation except in
objective reality, in the totality. All the rest is car­
icature. The objective realisation that functions
in the mechanism of the spectacle is nothing but
the success of power-manipulated objects (the
"objective realisation in subjectivity" of famous
artists, stars, celebrities of Who's Who). On the
level of the organisation of appearance, every
success - and every failure - is inflated until it
becomes a ,stereotype, and is broadcast as
though it were the only possible success or fail­
ure. So far power has been t he only judge,
though its judgment has been subjected to vari­
plis pressures, Its criteria are the only valid ones
for those who accept the spectacle and are sat­
isfied to play a role in it. But there are no more
artists on that stage, there are only extras.

25 The space.-time of private life was har-

monised in the space-time of myth.
Fourier's harmony responds to this perverted
harmony. As soon as myth no longer encom­
passes the individual and the partial in a totality
dominated by the sacred, each fragment sets
itself up a s a totality. The fragment set up as a
totality is, in fact, the totalitarian. In the dissoci­
ated space-time that constitutes . private life,
time - made absolute in the form of abstract
freedom, the freedom of the spectacle - consoli­
dates by its very dissociation the spatial
absolute of private life, its isolation and con­
striction. The mechanism of the alienating spec­
tacle wields such force that private life reaches
the point of being defined as that which is

deprived of spectacle; the fact that one escapes
roles and spectacular categories is experienced
as an additional privation, as a malaise which
power uses as a pretext to reduce everyday life
to insignificant gestures (sitting down; washing,
opening a door).

26

The spectacle that imposes its norms
on lived experience itself arises out of
lived experience. The time of the spectacle, lived
in the form of successive roles, makes the space
of authentic experience the area of objective
i mpotence, while at the same time the objective
i mpotence that stems from the conditioning of
privative appropriation makes the spectacle the
ultimate of potential freedom.
Elements born of lived experience are
acl<nowledged only on the level of the spectacle,
where they are expressed in the form of stereo­
types, although such expression is constantly
contested and refuted in and by lived experi­
ence. The composite portrait of the s urvivors whom Nietzsche referred to as the "little peo­
ple" or the "last men" - can be conceived only in
terms of the following dialectic of possibility
impossibility:
a) Possibility on the level of the spectacle
(va riety of abstract roles) reinforces
impossibility on the level of authentic
experience;
b) Impossibility (that is, limits imposed
on real experience by privative appropria­
tion) determines the field of abstract pos­
sibilities.
Survival is two-dimensional. Against such a
reduction, what forces can bring out what con­
stitutes the daily problem of all human beings:
the dialectic of s u rvival and life? Either the spe­
cific forces the SI has counted on will make pos­
sible the s upersession of these contraries,
reuniting space and time in the construction of
everyday life; or life and survival will become
locked in an antagonism growing weaker and
weaker until the point of ultimate confusion and
ultimate poverty is reached.
reality is spectacularly fragment·
2 7 Lived
ed and labelled in biological,
.
. sociologi­

cal or other categories which, while being relat­
ed to the communicable, never communicate

anything but facts emptied of their authentically
lived content. lt is in this sense that hierarchical
power, i m prisoning everyone in the objective
mechanism of privative appropriation (admis­
sion/exclusion, see section 3), is also a dictator­
ship over subjectivity. lt is as a dictator over sub­
jectivity that it strives, with limited chances of
success, to force each individual s ubjectivity to
become objectivised, that is, to become an
object it can manipulate. This extremely inter­
esting dialectic should be analysed in greater
detail (objective realisation in subjectivity - the
realisation of power - and objective realisation in
objectivity - which enters into the praxis of con­
structing eve·ryday life and destroying power).
Facts are deprived of content in the name of the
comm u nicable, in the name of an abstract uni­
versality, in the name of a perverted harmony in
which everyone realises himself in an inverted
perspective. In this context the SI is in the line of
contestation that runs through Sade, Fourier,
Lewis Carroll, Lautreamont, s urrealism, lettrism
at least in its least known currents, which were
the most extreme.
Within a fragment set up as a totality, each
further fragment is itself totalitarian. Sensitivity,
desire, will, intelligence, good taste, the subcon­
scious and all the categories of the ego were
treated as absolutes by individualism. Today
sociology is enriching the categories of psychol­
ogy, but the introduction of variety into the roles
merely accentuates the monotony of the identi·
fication reflex. The freedom of the "survivor" will
be to assume the abstract constituent to which
he has "chosen" to reduce himself. Once any
real realisation has been put out of the picture,
all that remains is a psychosociological drama­
tu rgy in which interiority functions as a safety­
valve, as an overflow to drain off the effects one
has worn for the daily exhi bition. S u rvival
becomes the ultimate stage of life organised as
the mechanical reproduction of memory.
now the approach to the totality
28 Until
has been falsified. Power has pai'asiti·
cally interposed itself as an indispensable medi·
ation between man and nature. But the relation
between man and nature is based only on prax·
is. lt is praxis which constantly breaks through
the coherent veneer of lies that myth and its

substitutes try to maintain. it .is praxis, even
alienated praxis, which maintains contact with
the totality. By revealing its own fragmentary
character, praxis at the same time reveals the
real totality (reality) : it is the totality being
realised by way of its opposite, the fragment.
In the perspective of praxis, every fragment is ·
totality. In the perspective of power, which alien­
ates praxis, every fragment is totalitarian. This
should be enough to wreck the attempts cyber­
netic power will make to envelop praxis in a mys­
tique, although the seriousness of these

Thus Manicheanism has found itself momentari­
ly revived. Why did St. Augustine attack the
Manicheans so relentlessly? it was because he
recognised the danger of a myth offering only
one solution, the victory of good over evil; he
saw that this impossibility threatened to pro­
voke the collapse of all mythical structures and
bring into the open the contradiction between
mythical and authentic life. Christianity offered
the third way, the way of sacred confusion. What
Christianity accomplished through the force of
myth is accomplished today through the force of

attem pts should not be u n derestimated.

things. There can no longer be any antagon ism

All praxis enters into our project; it enters
with its share of alienation, with the impurities
of power: but we are capable of filtering them
out: We will elucidate the force and purity of acts
of refusal as well as the manipulative maneou­
vres of power, not in a Manfchean perspective,
but as a means of developing, through our own
strategy, this combat in which everywhere, at
every moment, the adversaries are seeking one
another but only clashing accidentally, lost in
irremediable darkness and uncertainty.

29

Everyday life has always b�en drained
to the . advantage of apparent life, but
appearance, in its mythical cohesion, was pow­
erful enough to repress any mention of everyday
life. The poverty and emptiness of the spectacle,
revealed by all the varieties of capitalism and all
the varieties of bourgeoisie, has revealed both
the existence of everyday life (a shelter life, but
a shelter for what and from what?) . and the
poverty of everyday life. As reification and
bureaucratisation grow stronger, the debility of
the spectacle and of everyday life is the Ot11Y
thing that remains clear. The conflict between ·
the human and the inhuman has also been
transferred to the plane of appearance. As soon
as Marxism became an ideology, Marx's struggle
against ideoJogy in the name of the richness of
life was transformed into an ideological antHde­
ology, an antispectacle spectacle Gust as in
avant-garde culture the antispectacular specta­
cle is restricted to actors alone, antiartistic art
being created and understood only by artists, so
the relationship between this ideological anti­
ideology and the function of the professional
revolutionary in Leninism should be examined).

between Soviet workers and capitalist workers
or between the bomb of the Stalinist bureau­
crats and the bomb of the non-Stalinist bureau­
crats; there is no longer anything but unity in the
chaos of reified beings.
Who is responsible? Who should be shot?
We are dominated by a system, by an abstract
form. Degrees of humanity and inhumanity are
measured by purely quantitative variations of
passivity. The q uality is the same everywhere:
we are all proletarianised or well on the way to
becoming so. What are the traditional "revolu­
tionaries" doing? They are eliminating certain
distinctions, making sure that no proletarians
are any more proletarian than all the others. But
what party is working for the end of the prole­
tariat?
The perspective of survival has become
intolerable. What is weighing us down is the
weight of things in a vacuum. That's what reifi­
cation is: everyone and everything falling at an
equal speed, everyone and everyth ing stigma­
tised with their equal value. The reign of equal
values has realised the Christian project, but it
has realised it outside Christianity (as Pascal
had supposed) and, above all, it has realised it
over God's dead body, contrary to Pascal's
expectations.
The spectacle and everyday life coexist in
the reign of equal values. People and things are
interchangeable. The world of reification is a
world without a centre, like the new prefabricat­
ed cities that are its decor. The present fades
away before the promise of an eternal future
that is nothing but a mechanical extension of the
past. Time itself is deprived of a centre. In this
concentration-camp world, victims and torturers

wear the same mask and only the torture is real.
No new ideology can soothe the pain, neither
the ideology of the totality (Logos) nor that of
nihilism - which will be the two crutches of the
cybernetic society. The tortures condemn all
hierarchical power, however organised or dis­
simu lated it may be. The antagonism the SI is
going to revive is the oldest of all, it is radical
antagonism and that is why it is taking up again
and assimilating all that has been left by the
insu rrectionary movements and great individu­
als in the course of history.

So many other banalities could be
3 0 taken
up and reversed. The best things

never come to an end. Before rereading the
above - which even the most mediocre intelli­
gence will be able to understand by the third
attempt - the reader would be well-advised to
concentrate carefully on the following text, for
these notes, as fragmentary as the preceding
ones, must be discussed in detail and imple­
mented. lt concerns a central question: the SI
and revolutionary power.
Being aware of the crises of both mass par­
ties and "elites," the SI must embody the super­
session of both the Bolshevik Central Committee
(supersession of the mass party) and of the
Nietzschean project (supersession of the intelli·
gentsia).
a) Every time a power has presented itself
as directing a revolutionary upsurge, it
has automatically undermined the power
of the revolution. The Bolshevik C.C.
defined itself simultaneously as concen­
tration
and
as
representation.
Concentration of a power antagonistic to
bourgeois power and representation of
the will of the masses. This duality led it
rapidly to become no more than an em pty
power, a power of empty representation,
and consequently to rejoin, in a common
form (bureaucracy), a bourgeois power
that was being forced (in response to the
very existence of the Bolshevik power) to
. follow a similar evolution. The conditions
for a concentrated power and mass repre­
sentation exist potentially in the SI when
it states that it holds the qualitative and
that its ideas are in everyone's mind.

Nevertheless we refuse both concentrat·
ed power and the right of representation,
conscious that we are now taking the only
public attitude (for we cannot avoid being
known to some extent in a spectacular
manner) enabling those who find that
they .share our theoretical and practical
positions to accede to revolutionary
power: power without mediation, power
entailing the direct action of everyone.
Our guiding image could be the Durruti
Column, moving from town to village, liq­
uidating the bourgeois elements and
leaving the. workers to see to their own
self-organisation.
b) The intelligentsia is power's hall of mir­
rors. Contesting power, it never offers
anything but passive cathartic identifica. tion to those whose every gesture grop­
ingly expresses real contestation. The
radicalism not of theory, obviously, but
of gesture · that could be glimpsed in the
"Declaration of the 121," however, sug­
gests some different possibilities. We are
capable of precipitating this crisis, but we
can do so :only by entering the intelli­
gentsia as a power against the intelli­
gentsia. This phase - which must precede
and be contained within the phase
des.cribed in point a) - will put us in the
perspective of the Nietzschean project.
We will form a small, almost alchemical,
experimental group within which the real­
isation of the total man can be started.
N ietzsche could conceive of such an
undertaking only within the framework of
the hierarchical principle. lt . is, in fact,
within such a framework that we find our­
selves. it is therefore of the utmost impor­
tance that we present ourselves wit.hout
the slightest ambiguity (on the level of
the ,group, the purification- of the nucleus
and the elimination of residues now
seems to be completed). We accept the.
hierarchical framework in which we are
placed only while im patiently working to
abolish our domination over those whom
we cannot avoid dominating on the basis
of our criteria for mutual recognition.
c) Tactically our communication should
•

be a diffusion emanating from a more or
less hidden centre. We will establish nonÂ­
materialised networks (direct relationÂ­
ships, episodic ones, contacts without
ties, development of embryonic relations
based on sympathy and understanding,
in the manner of the red agitators before
the arrival of the revolutionary armies).
We will claim radical gestures (actions,
writings, political attitudes, works) as our
own by analysing them, and we will conÂ­
sider that our own acts and analyses are
supported by the majority of people.
J ust as God constituted the reference
point of past unitary society, we are
preparing to create the central reference
point for a unitary society now possible.
But this point cannot be fixed. As
opposed to the ever-renewed confusion
that cybernetic power draws from the
past of inhumanity, it stands for the game
that everyone will play, "the moving
order of the future."
Raou/ Vaneigem, lnternationa/e Situationniste 7
& 8, 1962 - 63

Paris: May 1968
Introduction
(Written for the original edition, published by
Solidarity in June 1968)

This is an eye-I,Nitness account of two weeks
spent in Paris d u ring May 1968. it is what one
person saw, heard or discovered during that
short period. The account has no pretence at
comprehensiveness. lt has been written and
produced i n haste, its purpose bein'g to inform
rather than to analyse and to inform quickly.
The French events have a significance that
extends far beyond the frontiers of modern
France. They will leave their mar� on the history
of the second half of the 2oth century. French
bourgeois society has just been shaken to its
foundations. Whatever the outcome of the pres­
ent struggle, we must calmly take note of the
fact that the political map of Western capitalist
society will never be the same again. A whole
epoch has just come to an end: the epoch during
which people couldn't say, with a semblance of
verisimilitude, that 'it couldn't happen here'.
Another epoch is starting: that in which people
know that revolution is possible under the con·
ditions of modern bureaucratic capitalism.
For Stalinism too, a whole period is ending:
the period during which Communist Parties i n
Western Europe could claim (admittedly with
dwindling credibility) that they remained revolu­
tionary organisations, but that revolutionary ,
opportunities had never really presented them·
selves. This notion has now irrevocably been
swept into the proverbial 'dustbin of h istory'.
When t h e chips were down, the French
Comm unist Party and those workers under its
influence proved to be the final and most effec­
tive �brake' on the development of the revolu·
tionary self-activity of the working class.
A full analysis of the French events will even­
tually have to be attempted, for, without an
•

understanding of modern society, it will never be
possible consciously to change it. But this analy·
sis will have to wait for a while until some of the
dust has settled. What can be said now is that, if
honestly carried out, such an analysis will corn·
pel many 'orthodox' revolutionaries to discard a
mass of outdated ideas, slogans and myths to
te-assess contemporary reality; particularly the
reality of modern bureaucratic capitalism, its
dynamic, its methods of control and manipula·
tion, the reasons for both its resilience and its
brittleness and most important of all the
nature of its crises. Concepts and organisations
that have been fou nd wanting will have to be
discarded. The new phenomena (new in them­
selves or new to traditional revolutionary theo­
ry) will have to be recognised for what they are
and interpreted in all their implications. The real
events of 1968 will then have to be integrated
into a new framework of ideas, for without this
development of revolutionary theory, there can
be no development of revolutionary practice
and in the long run no transformation of society
through the conscious actions of men.
•

•

•

Rue Gay Lussac
Sunday 12 May

The rue Gay-Lussac still carries the scars of the
' night of the barricades'. Burnt out cars line the
pavement, their carcasses a dirty grey under the
m issing paint. The cobbles, cleared from the
middle of the road, lie i n huge mounds on either
side. A vague smell of tear gas still lingers in the
air.
At the j unction with the rue des Ursulines
lies a building site, its wire mesh fence breached
in several places. From here came material for at
least a dozen barriCades: planks, wheelbarrows,
metal drums, steel girders, cement m ixers,

blocks of stone. The site also yielded a pneu­
matic drill. The students couldn't use it, of
course not until a passing building worker
showed them how, perhaps the first worker
actively to support the student revolt. Once bro­
ken, the road surface provided cobbles, soon
put to a variety of uses.
All that is already h istory.
People are walking up and down the street,
.as if trying to convince themselves that it really
happened. They aren't students. The students
themseiV('!S know what happened arid why it
happened. They aren't local inhabitants either.
The local inhabitants saw what happened, the
viciousness of the CRS charges, the assaults on
the wounded, the attacks on innocent
bystanders, the unleashed fury of the state
machine against those who had challenged it.
The people in the streets are the ordinary people
of Paris, people from neighbouring districts, hor­
rified at what they have heard over the radio or
read in their papers and who h ave come for a
walk on a fine Sunday morning to see for th�m­
selves. They are talking in small clusters with
the inhabitants of the rue Gay-Lussac. The
Revolution, having for a week held the universi·
ty and the streets of the Latin Quarter, is begin­
ning to take hold of the minds of men.
On Friday 3 May the CRS had paid their his·
toric visit to the Sorbonne. They had been invit·
ed in by Paul Roche, Rector of Paris University.
The Rector had almost certainly acted in con·
nivance with Alain Peyrefitte, M i nister of
Education, if not with the Elysee itself. Many stu·
dents had been arrested, beaten up, and several
were summarily convicted.
The u nbelievable yet thoroughly pre­
dictable ineptitude of this bureaucratic 'solu·
tion' to the 'problem' of student discontent trig­
gered off a chain reaction. lt provided the pent·
up anger, resentment and frustration of tens of
thousands of young people with both a reason
for further action and with an attainable objec­
tive. The students, evicted from the university,
took to the street, demanding the liberation of
their comrades, the reopening of their faculties,
the withdrawal of the cops.
Layers upon layers of new people were soon
drawn into the struggle. The student u nion
(UNEF) and the union representing university
•

•

·

teachi h g staff (SNESup) called for an unlimited
strike.' For a week the students held their
ground, in ever bigger and more militant street
demonstrations. On Tuesday 7 May so,ooo stu·
dents and teachers march('!d through the streets
behind a single banner: 'Vive La Commune', and
sang the lnternationale at the Tom b of the
Unknown Soldier, at the Arc de Triomphe. On
Friday 10 May students and teachers decided to
occupy the Latin Quarter en masse. They felt
they had more right to be there than the police,
for whom barracks were provided elsewhere.
The cohesion and sense of purpose of the
demonstrators terrified the Establishment.
Power couldn't be allowed to lie with this rabble,
who had even had the audacity to erect barri­
cades.
Another inept gesture was needed. Another
administrative reflex duly materialised. Fouchet
(Minister of the I nterior) and joxe (Deputy Prime
Minister) ordered Grimaud (Superintendent of
the Paris police) to clear the streets. The order
was confirmed in Writing, doubtless to be pre­
served for posterity as an example of what not to
do i n · certain situations. The CRS charged...
clearing the rue Gay-Lussac and opening the
doors to the second phase of the Revolution.
In the rue Gay-Lussac and i n adjoining
streets, the battle-scarred walls carry a dual
message. They bear testimony to the incredible
courage of those who held the area for several
hours against a deluge of tear gas, phosphorous
grenades and repeated charges of dub-swing­
ing CRS. But they also show something of what
the defe nders were striving for...
Mural propaganda is an i ntegral part of the
revolutionary Paris of May 1968. it has become a
mass activity, part and parcel of the Revolution's
method of self-expression. the walls of the Latin
Quarter are the depository of a new rationality;
no longer confined to books, but democratically
displayed at street level and made available to
all. The trivial and the p rofound, the traditional
and the esoteric, rub shoulders in this new fra­
ternity, rapidly breaking down the rigid barriers
and compartments in people's minds.
'Desobeir d'abord: alors ecris sur \es murs
(Loi d u 10 Mai 1968)' reads an obviously recent
inscription, clearly setting the tone. 'Si tout le
peuple faisait comme no us' (if everybody acted

like us ... ) wistfully dreams another in joyful
anticipation, I think, rather than in any spirit of
self-satisfied substitutionism. Most of the slo·
gans are straightforward, correct and fairly
orthodox: 'Liberez nos camarades'; 'Fouchet,
Grimaud, demission'; 'A bas l'Etat policier';
'Greve Generate Lundi'; 'Travailleurs, etudiants,
soldaires'; 'Vive les Conseils Ouvriers'. Other
slogans reflect the new concerns: 'La publicite te
manfpule'; 'Examens
hierarchie'; ' L'art .est
mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre'; 'A bas la
societe de consommation'; 'Debout les damnes
de Nanterre'. The slogan 'Baisses·toi et broute'
(Bend your head and chew the cud) is obviously
aimed at those whose minds are still full of tra·
ditional preoccupations.
'Contre la fermentation groupusculaire'
moans a large scarlet inscription. This one is
really out of touch. For everywhere there is a
profusion of pasted up posters and journals:
Voix Ouvriere, Avant·Garde and Revoltes (for the
Trotskyists), Servir le Peuple and Humanite
Nouvel/e (for the devotees of Chairman Mao), Le
Libertaire (for the Anarchists), Tribune Socialiste
(for the PSU). Even odd copies of /' Humanite are
pasted up. lt is difficult to read them, so covered
are they with critical comments.
On a hoarding, I see a large advertisement
for a new brand of cheese: a child biting into an
enormous sandwich. 'C'est bon le fromage So·
and·So' runs the patter. Someone has covered
the last few words with red paint. The poster
reads 'C'est bon la Revolution'. People pass by,
look, and smile.
I talk to my companion, a man of about 45,
an 'old' revolutionary. We discuss the tremen·
dous possibilities now opening up. He suddenly
turns towards me and comes out with a memo·
rable phrase: "To think one had to have kids and
wait 20 years to see all this... .
We talk to others in the street, to young and
old, to the 'political' and the 'unpolitical', to peo·
ple at all levels of understanding and commit·
ment. Everyone is prepared to talk · in fact
everyone wants to. They all seem remarkably
articulate. We find no·one prepared to defend
the actions of the administration. The 'critics' fall
into two main groups:
The 'progressive' university teachers, the
Communists, and a number of students see the
=

"

main root of the student 'crisis' in the backward·
ness of the university in relation to society's cur·
rent needs, in the quantitative inadequacy of the
tuition provided, in the semi-feudal attitudes of
some professors, and in the general insufficien·
cy of job opportunities. They see the University
as unadapted to the modern world. The remedy
for them is adaptation: a modernising reform
which would sweep away the cobwebs, provide
more teachers, better lecture theatres, a bigger
educational budget, perhaps a more liberal atti·
tude on the campus and, at the end of it all, an
assured job.
The rebels (which include some but by no
means all of the 'old' revolutionaries) see this
concern with adapting the university to modern
society as something of a diversion. For it is
modern society itself which they reject. They
consider bourgeois life trivial and mediocre,
repressive and repressed. They have no yearn·
ing (but only contempt) for the administrative
and managerial careers it holds out for them.
They are not seeking integration into adult soci·
ety. On the contrary, they are seeking a chance
radically to contest its adulteration. The driving
force of their revolt is their own alienation, the
meaninglessness of life under modern bureau·
cratic capitalism. lt is certainly not a purely eco·
nomic deterioration in their standard of living.
lt is no accident that the 'revolution' started
i.n the Nanterre faculties of Sociology and
Psychology. The students saw that the sociology
they were being taught was a means of control·
ling and manipulating society, not a means of
understanding it in order to change it. In the
process they discovered revolutionary sociology.
They rejected the niche allocated to them in the
great bureaucratic pyramid, that of 'experts' in
the service of a technocratic Establishment, spe·
cialists of the 'human factor' in the modern
industrial equation. In the process they discov·
ered the importance of the working class. The
amazing thing is that, at least among the active
layers of the students, these 'sectarians' sud·
denly seem to have become the majority: surely
the best definition of any revolution.
The two types of 'criticism' of the modern
French educational system do not neutralise one
another. On the contrary, each creates its own
kind of problems for the University authorities

and for the officials at the Ministry of Education.
The real point is that one kind of criticism · what
one might call the quantitative one - could i n
time b e coped with by modern bourgeois socie­
ty. The other.- the qualitative one · never. This is
what gives it its revolutionary potential. The
'trouble with the University', for the powers that
be, isn't that money can't be found for more
teachers. lt can. The 'trouble' is that the
University is full of students · and that the heads
of the students are full of revolutionary Ideas.
Among those we speak to there is a deep
awareness that the problem cannot be solved i n
the Latin Quarter, that isolation o f the revolt in a
student 'ghetto' (even an 'autonomous' one)
would spell defeat. They realise that the salva­
tion of the movement lies in its extension to
other sectors of the population. But here wide
d ifferences appear. When some talk of the
importance of the working class it is as a substi­
tute for getting on with any kind of struggle
themselves, an excuse for denigrating the stu­
dents' struggle as 'adventurist'. Yet it is precise­
ly because of its unparalleled militancy that the
students' action has established that direct
action works, has begun to i nfluence the
younger workers and to rattle the established
organisations. Other students realise the rela­
tionship of these struggles more clearly. We will
find them later. at Censier, animating the 'work­
er-student' action committees.
But enough, for the time being, about the
Latin Quarter. The movement has already spread
beyond its narrow confines.

May 1': From Renault to the streets
of Par1s
Monday 13 May
6:15am, Avenl!e Yves Kermen. A clear, cloudless
day. Crowds begin to gather outside the gates of
the giant Renault works at Bol!logne Billancourt.
The main trade union 'centrales' (CGT, CFDT and
FO) have called a one day general strike. They
are protesting against police violence in the
Latin Quarter and in support of long-neglected
claims concerning wages, hours, the age of
retirement and trade union rights in the plants.
The factory gates are wide open. Not a cop

or. supervisor in sight. The workers stream in. A
loud hailer tells them to proceed to their respec­
tive shops, to refuse to start work and to. pro­
ceed, at Sa m, to their traditional meeting place,
an enormous shed-like structure in the middle of
the lle Seguin (an island in the Seine entirely
co)lered by parts of the Renault plant).
As each worker goes through the gates; the
pickets give him a leaflet, jointly produced by
the three unions. Leaflets in Spanish are also
distributed (over 2000 Spanish workers are
employed at Renault). French and Spanish ora­
tors succeed one another, in short spells, at the
microphone. Although all the unions are sup­
porting the one-day strike, all the orators seem
to belong to the CGT. lt's their loudspeaker...
6:45am. H u n d reds of workers are · now
stream ing in. Many look as if they had come to
work rather than to participate in mass meetings
at the plant. The decision to call the strike was
only taken on the Saturday afternoon, after
many of the men had already dispersed for the
weekend. Many seem unaware of what it's all
about. I am struck by the number of Algerian and
black workers.
There are only a few posters at the gate,
again mainly those of the CGT. Some pickets
carry CFDT posters. There isn't an FO poster in
sight. The road and walls outside the factory
have been well covered with slogans: 'One day
strike on Monday'; 'Unity in defence of our
claims'; 'No to the monopolies'.
The little cafe near the gates is packed.
People seem u nusually wide awake and commu­
nicative for so early an hour. A newspaper kiosk
is selling about three copies of I' Humanite for
every copy of anything else. The local branch of
the Communist Party is distributing a leaflet
calling for 'resolution; calm, vigilance and unity'
and warning against 'provocateurs'.
The pickets make no attempt to argue with
those pouring in. No-one seems to know
whether they will obey the strike call or not. Less
than 25°/o of Renault workers belong to any
' union at all. This is the biggest car factory in
Europe.
The loud hailer hammers home its message:
"The CRS have recently assaulted peasants at
'
Quimper, and workers at Caen, Rhodiaceta
(Lyon) and Dassault. Now they are turning on the
·

students. The regime will not tolerate opposi­
tion. lt will not modernise the country. lt will not
grant us our basic wage demands. Our one day
strike will show both Government and em ploy­
ers our determination. We must compel them to
retreat." The message is repeated again and
again, like a gramophone record. I wonder
whether the speal<er believes what he says,
whether he even senses what lies ahead.
At 7am a dozen Trotskyists of the FER
(Federation des Etudiants Revolutionaires) turn
up to sell their paper Revoltes. They wear large
red and white buttons proclaiming their identity.
A little later another group arrives to sell Voix
Ouvriere. The loudspeaker immediately switch­
es from an attack on the Gaullist government
and its CRS to an attack on "provocateurs" and
"disru ptive elements, alien to the working
class". The Stalinist speaker hints that the sell­
ers are in the pay of the government. As they are
here, "the police must be lurking in the neigh­
bourhood". Heated arguments break out
between sellers and CGT officials. The CFDT
pickets are refused the use of the loudh!'liler.
They shout "democratie o uvriere" and defend
the right of the 'disruptive elements' to sell their
stuff. A rather abstract right, as not a sheet is
sold. The front page of Revoltes carries an eso­
teric article on Eastern Europe.
M uch invective (but no blows) are
exchanged. In the course of a n argument I hear
Bro. Trigon (delegate to the second e lectoral
'college' at Renau lt) describe Danny Cohn·
Bend it as "un agent du pouvoir" (an agent of the
authorities). A student takes him up on this
point. The Trots don't. Shortly before Sam they
walk off, . their 'act of presence' accomplished
and d uly recorded for history.
At about the same time, hundreds of work­
ers who had entered the factory leave their
shops and assemble i n the sunshine in an open
space a few hundred yards inside the main gate.
From there they amble towards lie Seguin,
crossing one arm of the river Seine on the way.
Other processions leave other points of the fac­
tory and converge on the same area. The metal·
tic ceiling is nearly 200 feet above our heads.
Enormous stocks of components are piled up
high right and left. Far away to the right an
assembly line is still working, lifting what looks
·

like rear car seats, corn plete with attached
springs, from the ground to fi rst floor level.
Some to,ooo workers are soon assembled
in the shed. The orators address them through a
loudspeaker from ·a narrow platform some 40
feet up. The platform runs in front of what looks
like an elevated inspection post but which I am
told is a union office inside the factory.
The CGT speaker deals with various section­
al wage claims. He denounces the resistance of
the government "in the hands of the monopo­
lies". He produces facts and figures dealing with
the wage structure. Many highly skilled men are
not getting enough. A CFDT sp·eaker follows him.
He deals with the steady speed-up, with the
worsening of working conditions, with accidents
and with the fate of man in production. "What
kind of life is this? Are we always to remain pup­
pets, carrying out every whim of the manage­
ment?" He advocates uniform wage increases
for all ('augmentations non-hierarchisees'). An
FO speaker follows. He is technically the most
competent, but says the least. In flowery rheto­
ric he talks of 1936, but omits all reference to
Leon Blum. The record of FO is bad in the facto­
ry and the speaker is heckled from time to time.
The CGT speakers then ask the workers to
participate en masse in the big rally planned for
that afternoon. As the last speaker finishes, the
aowd spontaneously breaks out into a rousing
'lnternationale'. The older men seem to know
most of the words. The younger workers only
know the chorus. A friend nearby assures me
that in 20 years this is the first time he has heard
the song sung inside Renault (he has attended
dozens of mass meetings in the lle Seguin);
There is an atmosphere of excitement, particu­
larly among the younger workers.
The crowd then breaks up into several sec­
tions. Some walk back over the bridge and out of
the factory. Others proceed systematically
through the shops where a few hundred blokes
are still at work. Some of these men argue but
most seem only too glad for an excuse 'to stop
and join in the p rocession. Gangs weave their
way, joking and singing, amid the giant presses
and tanks. Those remaining at work are ironical­
ly cheered, clapped or exhorted to "step on it",
or "work harder". Occasional foremen look on
helplessly, as one assembly line after another i s

CONSfll iU�RAL du REL

brought to a halt.
Many of the lathes have coloured pictures
plastered over them: pin·ups and green fields,
sex and s unshine. Anyone still working i s
exhorted to get o u t into the daylight, not just to
dream about it. In the main plant, over half a
mile long, hardly 12 men remain in their overalls.
Not an angry voice can be heard. There is much
good h u moured banter. By uam thousands of
workers have poured out into the warmth of a
morning in May. An open-air beer and sandwich
stall, outside the gate, is doing a roaring trade.
1.15 pm. The streets are crowded. The
response to the call for a 24-hour general strike
has exceeded the wildest hopes of the trade
unions. Despite the short notice Paris is paral·
ysed. The strike was only decided 48 hours ago,
after the 'night of the barricades'. lt is moreover
'illegal'. The law of the land demands a five-day
notice before an 'official' strike can be called.
Too bad for legality.
A solid phalanx of young people is walking
up the Boulevard de Sebastopol, towards the
Gare de I' Est. They are proceeding to the student
rallying point for the giant demonstration called
jointly by the unions, the students' organisation
(UN E F) and the teachers' associations (FEN and
SN ESup).
There is not a bus or car in sight. The streets
of Paris today belong to the demonstrators.
Thousands of them are already in the square in
front of the station. Thousands more are moving
in from every direction. The plan agreed by the
sponsoring organisations is for the different cat­
egories to assemble separately and then to con·
verge on the Place de la Republique, from where
the march will proceed across Paris, via the Latin
Quarter, to the Place Denfert-Rochereau.
We are already packed like sardines for as
far as the eye can see, yet there is more than an
hour to go before we are d ue to proceed. The
sun has been shining all day. The girls are in
summer dresses, the young men in shirt sleeves.
A red flag is flying over the railway station. There
are many red flags in the crowd and several
black ones too.
A man suddenly appears carrying a s uitcase
full of duplicated leaflets. He belongs to some
left 'groupuscule' or other. He opens his s uitcase
and distributes perhaps a dozen leaflets, Sut he

doesn't have to continue alone. There is an
unquenchable thirst for information, ideas, liter­
ature, argument, polemic. The man just stands
there as people surround him and press forward
to get the leaflets. Dozens of demonstrators,
without even reading the leaflet, help him dis­
tribute them. Some 6ooo copies get out in a few
minutes. All seem to be assidiously read. People
argue, laugh, joke. I witnessed such scenes
again and again .
Sellers of revolutionary literature are doing
well. An edict, signed by the organisers of the
demonstration, that "the only literature allowed
would be that of the organisations sponsoring
the demonstration" (see I' Humanite, 13 May
t968) is being enthusiastically flouted. This
b u reaucratic restriction (much criticised the pre­
vious evening when announced at Censier by the
stud ent d e legates to the Co-ordinating
Committee) obviously cannot be enforced i n a
crowd of this size. The revolution is bigger than
any organisation, more tolerant than any institu­
tion 'representing' the masses, more realistic
than any edict of any Central Committee.
Demonstrators have climbed onto walls,
onto the roofs of bus stops, onto the railings in
front of the station . Some have loud hailers and
make short speeches. All the 'politicos' seem to
be in one part or other of this crowd. I can see
the banner of the )eunesse Comm uniste
Revolutionaire, portraits of Castro and Che
Guevara, the banner of the FER, several banners
of 'Servir le Peuple' (a Maoist group) and the
banner of the UJCML (Union de la ]eunesse
Comm u n iste Marxiste-Leniniste), another
Maoist tendency. There are also banners from
many educational establishments now occupied
by those who work there. Large groups of
lyceens (high school kids) m ingle with the stu·
dents as do many thousands of teachers.
At about 2pm the student section sets off,
singing the 'lnternationale'. We march zo-30
abreast, arms linked. There is a row of red flags
in front of us, then a banner so feet wide carry­
ing four simple words: 'Etudiants, Enseignants,
Travailleurs, Solidaires'. lt is an im pressive
sight.
.
The whole Boulevard de Magenta is a solid
seething mass of humanity. We can't enter the
Place de la Republique, already packed full of

demonstrators. One can't even move along the
pavements or through adjacent streets. Nothing
but people, as far a s the eye can see.
As we proceed slowly down the Boulevard
de Magenta, we notice on a third floor balcony,
high on our right, an SFIO (Socialist Party) head·
quarters. The balcony is bedecked with a few
decrepit-looking red flags and a banner pro·
claiming 'Solidarity with the students'. A few
elderly characters wave at us, somewhat self·
consciously. Someone in the crowd starts chant·
ing "0-pur-tu·nistes". The slogan is taken up,
rhythmically roared by thousands, to the dis·
comfiture of those on the. balcony who beat a
hasty retreat. The people have not forgotten the
use of the CRS against the striking miners in
1958 by 'socialist' Minister of the Interior Jules
Moch. They remember the 'socialist' Prime
Minister Guy Mollet and his role d uring the
Algerian War. Mercilessly, the crowd shows its
contempt for the discredited politicians now
seeking to j u m p on the bandwagon. "Guy
Mollet, au musee", tliey shout, amid laughter. lt
is truly the end of an epoch.
At about 3Pm we at last reach the Place de
la Republique, our point of departure. The crowd
here is so dense that several people faint and
have to be carried into neighbouring cafes. Here
people are packed almost as tight as in the
street, but can at least avoid being injured. The
window of one cafe gives way under the pres­
sure of the crowd outside. There is a genuine
fear, in several parts of the crowd, of being
crushed to death. The first union contingents
fortunately begin to leave the square. There isn't
a policeman in sight.
Although the demonstration has been
announced as a joint one, the CGT leaders are
still striving desperately to avoid a mixing-up, on
the streets, of students and workers. In this they
are moderately successful. By about 4-3opm the
students' and teachers' contingent, perhaps
8o,ooo strong, finally leaves the Place " de la
Republique. H undreds of thousands of demon·
strators have preceded it, hundreds of thou·
sands follow it, butthe ' left' contingent has been
well and truly 'bottled-in'. Several groups,
understanding at last the CGT's manoeuvre�
break·loose once we are out of the square. They
take short cuts via various side streets, at the

double, and succeed in infiltrating groups of 100
or so into parts of the march ahead of them, or
behind them. The Stalinist stewards walking
hand in hand and hemming the march in on
either side are powerless to prevent these sud­
den influxes. The student demonstrators scatter
like fish in water as soon as they have entered a
given contingent. The CGT marchers themselves
are q u ite friendly and readily assimilate the
newcomers, not quite sure what it's all about.
The students' appearance, dress and speech
does not enable them to be identified as readily
as they would be in Britain.
The main student contingent proceeds as a
compact body. Now that we are past the bottle­
neck of the Place de la Republique the pace i s
quite rapid. The student group nevertheless
takes at least half an hour to pass a given point.
The slogans of the students contrast strikingly
with those of the CGT. The students shout "le
Pouvoir aux Ouvriers" (All Power to the
Workers); "le Pouvoir est dans la rue" (Power
lies in the street); "liberez nos camarades". CGT
members shout ,; Pompidou, de m i ssion"
(Pom pidou, resign). The students chant "de
Gaulle, assassin", or "CRS·SS". The CGT: "Des
sous, pas de matraques" (money, not police
clubs) or "Defence du pouvoir d'achat" (Defend
our purchasing power). The students say "Non a
I'Universite de classe". The CGT and the Stalinist
students, grouped around the banner of their
paper Clarte reply "Universite Democratique".
Deep political differences lie behind the differ·
ences of e m phasis. Some slogans are taken u p
b y everyone, slogans such a s "Dix ans, c'est
assez", "A bas I'Etat poli c ier", or "Bon anniver­
saire, mon General". Whole groups mournfully
entone a well-known refrain: "Adieu, de Gau\le".
They wave their hand kerchieves, to the great
merriment of the bystanders.
As the main stui:lent contingent crosses tlie
Pont St Michel to enter the Latin Quarter it sud·
denly stops, in silent tribute to its wounded. All
thoughts are for a moment switched to those
lying in hospital, their sight in danger through
too much tear gas or their skulls or ribs fractured
by the truncheons of the CRS. The sudden, angry
silence of this noisiest part of the demonstration
conveys a deep impression of strength and reso­
lution. One senses massive accounts yet to be
·

E

settled.
At the top of the Boulevard St Michel l drop
out of the march, cli mb onto a parapet lining the
Luxembourg Gardens, and just watch. I remain
there for two hours as row after row of demon­
strators marches past, 30 or more a breast, a
human tidal wave of fantastic, inconceivable
size. How many are they? 6oo,ooo? 8oo,ooo? A
million? t,soo,ooo? No-one can really number
· them. The first of the demonstrators reached the
final dispersal point hours before the last ranks
had left the Place de la Republique, at 7pm.
There were banners of every kind: union
banners, student . ban ners, political banners,
no n-political banners, reformist banners, revolu­
tionary banners, banners of the 'Mouvement
contre i'Armement Atomiq ue', banners of vari­
ous Conseils de Parents d'Eleves, banners of
every conceivable size and shape, proclaiming a
common abhorrence at what had happened and
a common will to struggle on. Some banners
were loudly applauded, such as the one saying
'Liberons !'information' (Let's have a free news
service) carried by a group of employees from
the ORTF. Some banners indulged in vivid sym­
bolism, such as the gruesome one carried by a
group of a rtists, depicting human hands, heads
and eyes, each with its price tag, on display on
the hooks and trays of a butcher's shop.
Endlessly they filed past. There were whole
sections of hospital personnel, in white· coats,
some carrying posters saying 'Ou sont les dis­
parus des hopitaux?' (where are the missing
injured?). Every factory, every major workplace
seemed to be represented. There were numer­
ous groups of railwaymen, postmen, printers,
Metro personnel, metal workers, airport work­
ers, marl<et men, electricians, lawyers, sewer­
men, bank em ployees, building workers, glass
and chemical workers, waiters, m u n icipal
employees, painters and decorators, gas work­
ers, shop girls, insurance clerks, road sweepers,
film studio operators, busmen, teachers, work­
ers from t h e new plastic industries, row upon
row upon row of them, the flesh and blood of
modern capitalist society, an unending mass, a
power that could sweep everything before it, if it
but decided to do so.
My thoughts went to those who say that the
workers are only interested in football, in the

'tierce' (horse-betting), in watching the telly, i n
their annual 'conges' (holidays), a n d that the
worldng class cannot see beyond the problems
of its everyday life. lt was so palpably untrue. I
also thought of those who say that only a narrow
and rotten leadership lies between the masses
and the total transformation of society. lt was
equally u ntrue. Today the working class i s
beco ming conscious of i t s strength. W i l l i t
decide, tomo rrow, to u s e it?
I rejoin the march and we proceed towards
Denfert Rochereau. We pass several statues,
sedate gentlemen now bedecked with red flags
or carrying slogans such as 'Liberez nos cama­
rades'. As we pass a hospital silence again
descends on the endless crowd. Someone starts
whistling the 'lnternationale'. Others take it up.
Like a breeze rustling over an enormous field of
corn, the whistled tune ripples out in all direc­
tions, From the windows of the hospital some
nurses wave at us.
At various intersectio n s we pass traffic
lights which by some strange inertia still seem
to be working. Red and green alternate, at fixed
intervals, meaning as little as bourgeois educa­
tion, as work in modern society, as the lives of
those walking past. The reality of today, for a few
hours, has submerged all of yesterday's pat­
terns.
The part of the march in which I find myself
is now rapidly approaching what the organisers
have decided should be the dispersal point. The
CGT is desperately keen that its hundreds o f
thousands o f supporters should disperse quiet�
ly. lt fears them, when they are together. lt wants
them nameless atoms again, scattered to the
four corners of Paris, powerless in the context of
their individual preoccupations. The CGT sees
itself as the only possible link between them, as
the divinely ordained vehicle for the expression
of their collective will. The 'Mouvement du 22
Mars', on the other hand, had issued a call to the
students and workers, asking them to stick
together and to proceed to the lawns of the
Champ de Mars (at the foot of the Eiffel Tower)
for a massive collective discussion on the expe­
riences of the day and on the problems that lie
ahead.
At this stage I sample for the first time what
a 'service d'ord.re' composed · of Stalinist stew-

ards really means. All day, the stewards have
obviously been anticipating this particular
moment. They are very tense, clearly expeCting
'trouble'. Above all else they fear what they call
'debordement', ie being outflanked on fhe left.
For the last half-mile of the march five or six
solid rows of them line u p on either side of the
demonstrators. Arms linked, they form a mas­
sive sheath around the marchers. CGT officials
address the bottled�up demonstrators through
two powerful loudspeakers mounted on vans,
instructing them to d isperse q u ietly via the
Boulevard Arago, ie to p roceed in precisely the
opposite direction to the one leading to the
Champ de Mars. Other exits from the Place
Denfert Rochereau are blocked by lines of stew­
ards linking arms.
On occasions like this, I am told, the
Communist Party calls up thousands of its mem·
bers from the Paris area. lt also summons mem­
bers from miles around, bringing them up by the
coachload from places as far away as Rennes,
Orleans, Sens, Lille and Limoges. The municipal­
ities under Communist Party control provide fur­
ther hundreds of these 'stewards' not necessari­
ly Party members, but people dependent on the
goodwill of the Party for their jobs arid future.
Ever since its heyday of participation in the gov­
ernment (1945-47) the Party has had this kind of
mass base in the Paris suburbs. lt has invariably
used it in circumstances like today. On this
demonstration there must be at least 1o,ooo
such stewards, possibly twice that number.
The exhortations of the stewards meet with
a variable response. Whether they are success­
ful in getting particular groups to d isperse via
the Boulevard Arago depends of course on the
composition of the groups. Most of those which
the students h ave not succeeded in infiltrating
obey, although even here some of the younger
militants protest: "We are a . million in the
streets. Why should we go home?" Other groups
hesitate, vacillate, start arguing. Student speak·
ers climb on walls and shout: "All those who
want to return to the telly, turn down the
Boulevard Arago. Those who are for joint worker­
student discussions and for developing the
struggle, turn down the Boulevard Raspai i and
proceed to the Champ de Mars".
.
Those p rotesting against the dispersion

orders are immediately jumped on by the stew·
ards, denounced as 'provocateurs' and often
man-handled. I saw several. comrades of the
'Mouvement du 22 Mars' physic ally assaulted,
their portable loudhailers snatched from their
hands and their leaflets torn from them and
thrown to the ground. I n some sections there
seemed to be dozens, in others hundreds, i n
others thousands o f ' provocateurs'. A number of
minor punch-ups take place as the stewards are
swept aside by these particular contingents.
Heated arguments break out, the demonstrators
denouncing the Stalinists as 'cops' and as 'the
last rampart of the bourgeoisie'.
A respect for facts compels me to admit that
most contingents followed the orders of the
trade union bureaucrats. The repeated slanders
by the CGT and Communist Party leaders had
had their effect. The students were "trouble·
makers", "adventurers", "dubious elements".
Their proposed action would "only lead to a
massive i ntervention by the CRS" (who had kept
well out of sight throughout the whole of the
afternoon). "This was just a demonstration, not
a prelude to Revolution." Playing ruthlessly on
the most backward sections of the crowd, and
physically assaulting the more advanced sec­
tions, the apparatchniks of the CGT succeeded in
getting the bulk of the demonstrators to dis·
perse, often under protest. Thousands went to
the Champ de Mars. But h u ndreds of thousands
went home. The Stalinists won the day, but the
arguments started will surely reverberate down
the months to come.
At about 8pm an episode took place which
changed the temper of the last sectio"ns of the
march, now approaching the dispersal point. A
polic e van suddenly came u p one of the streets
leading into the Place Denfert Rochereau. lt
must have strayed from its intended route, or
perhaps its driver had assumed that the demon­
strators had already d ispersed: Seeing the
crowd ahead the two u niformed gendarmes in
the front seat panicked. U nable to reverse in
time in order to retreat, the driver decided that
his life hinged on forcing a passage through the
thinnest section of the crowd. The vehicle accel·
erated, hurling itself into the demonstrators at
about so miles an hour. People scattered wildly
in all directions. Several people were knocked

down and two were seriously inj ured. Many
more narrowly escaped. The van was finally sur­
rounded. One. of the policemen in the front seat
. was dragged out and repeatedly punched by the
infuriated crowd, determined to lynch him. He
was finally rescued, in the nick of time, by the
stewards. They more or less carried him, semi­
consciqus, down a side street where he was
passed horizontally, l i ke . a battered blood
sausage, through an open ground floor window.
To do this, the stewards had had to engage
in a running fight with several hundred very
angry marchers. The crowd then started rocking
the stranded police van. The remaining police­
man drew his revolver and fired. People ducked.
By a .miracle no-one was hit. A hundred yards
away the bullet made a hole, about three feet
above ground level, in a window of ' le Belfort', a
big can� at 297 Boulevard Raspail. The stewa rds
again rushed to the rescue, forming a barrier
between the crowd and the police . van, which
was allowed to escape down a side street, driv­
en by the policeman who had fired at the crowd.
Hundreds of demonstrators then thronged
round the hole in the window of the cafe. Press
photographers were summoned, arrived, d u ly
took their close-ups - none of which, of course,
were ever published. (Two d ays later I' Humanite
carried a few lines about the episode, at the bot­
tom of a column on page s.) One effect of the
episode is that several thousand more demon­
. strators decided not to disperse. They turned
and marched down towards the Champ de Mars,
shouting "lls ont tire a Oenfert" (they've shot at
us at Oenfert). If the incident had taken place an
hour earlier, the evening of 13 May might have
had a very different complexion.

The Sorbonne 'Soviet'
On Saturday 11 May, shortly before midnight, Mr
Pompidou, Prime Minister of France, overruled
his Minister of the I nterior, his M inister of
Education, and issued orders to his 'independ­
ent' Judiciary. He ·announced that the police
would be withdrawn from the Latin Quarter, that
the faculties would re-open on Monday 13 May,
and that the law would 'reconsider' the question
of the students arrested the previous week. lt
was the biggest political climb-down of his

career. For the students, and for many others, it
was the l lving proof that direct action worked.
Concessions had been won through struggle
which had been unobtainable by other means.
Early on the Monday morning the CRS pla­
toons guard ing the entrance to the Sorbonne
were d iscreetly withdrawn. The students moved
in, first in small groups, then in hundreds, later
in thousands. By midday the occupation. was
complete. Every 'tricolore' was promptly hauled
down, every lecture theatre occupied. Red flags
were hoisted from the official flagpoles and from
improvised ones at many windows, some over­
looking the streets, others the big internal court­
yard. Hundreds of feet above the milling stu·
dents, enormous red and black flags fluttered
side by side from the Chapel dome.
What happened over the next few days will
leave a permanent mark on the French educa­
tional system, on the structure of French society
and most important of aH on the minds of
those who lived and made history d u ring that
hectic first fortnight. The Sorbonne was sudden­
ly transformed from the fusty precinct where
French capitalism selected and moulded its hierc
archs, its technocrats and its administrative
bureaucracy into a revolutionary vol c ano in full
eruption whose lava was to spread far and wide,
searing the social structure of modern France.
The physical occupation of the Sorbonne
was followed by an intellectual explosion of
unprecedented violence. Everything, literally
everything, was suddenly and simultaneously ·
up for discussion, for question, for challenge.
There were no taboos. lt is easy to criticise the
chaotic upsurge of thoughts, ideas and propos­
als unleashed in . such c.ircu mstances.
'Professional revolutionaries' and petty bour­
geois philistines criticised to their heart's con­
tent. Butin so doing they only revealed �ow they
themselves were trapped in the ideolpgy of a
previous epoch and were incapable of tran·
scending it. They failed to recognise the tremen­
dous significance of the new, of all that could
not be apprehended within their own pre-estab­
lished intellectual categories. The phenomenon
was witnessed again and agailil, as it dou btless
has been in every really great upheaval in histo­
ry.
Day and night, every lecture theatre was
•

•

packed out, the seat of continuous, passionate
debate on every subject that ever preoccupied
thinking h u man ity. No formal lecturer ever
enjoyed so massive an audience, was ever lis·
tened to with such rapt attention or given such
short shrift if he talked nonsense.
A kind of order rapidly prevailed. By the sec­
ond day a noticeboard had appeared near the
front entrance a n n o u ncing what was being
talked about, and where. ! noted: 'Organisation
of the struggle'; 'Political and trade u n ion rights
in the Un iversity'; 'University crisis or social cri­
sis?'; ' Dossier of police repression'; 'Self-man­
agement'; 'Non-selection' (or how to open the
doors of the U niversity to everyone); 'Methods
of teaching'; 'Exams', etc. Other lecture theatres
were given over to the students-workers liaison
comm ittees, soon to assume great i mportance.
In yet other halls, discussions were under way
on 'sexual repression', on 'the colonial ques­
tion', on 'ideo logy and mystification'. Any group
of people wishing to d i scuss anything under the
sun would just take over one of the lecture the·
atres or smaller rooms. Fortunately there were
dozens of these.
The first impression was of a gigantic lid
suddenly lifted, of pent-up thoughts and aspira­
tions · suddenly exploding, on being released
from the realrrf of dreams into the realm of the
real and the possible. In changing their environ­
ment people themselves were changed. Those
who had never dared say anything suddenly felt
their thoughts to be the most i mportant thing in
the world and said so. The shy became com­
municative. The helpless and isolated suddenly
discovered that collective power lay in their
hands. The traditionally apathetic suddenly
realised the intensity of their involvement. A
t remendous su rge of commu nity and cohesion
gripped those who had previously seen them­
selves as iso lated and im potent puppets, domi­
nated by institutions that they could neither
control nor understand. People just went up and
tall,ed to one another without a trace of self-con·
sciousness. This state of euphoria lasted
throughout the whole .fortnight I was there. An
inscription scrawled on a wall sums it up per­
fectly: 'Deja dix jours de bonheur' (ten days of
happiness already).
In the yard of the Sorbonne, politics
•

•

•

(frowned on for a generation) took over with a
vengeance. Literature stalls sprouted up a \e ng
the whole inner perimeter. Enormo us. portraits
appeared on the internal walls: MarX;·· Lenin,
Trotsky, Mao, Castro; G uevara, a revolutionary
resurrection breaking the bounds of time and
place. Even Stalin put i n a transient appeai�nce
(above a Maoist stall) until it was tactfully sug­
gested to the comrades that he wasn't really at
home in such company.
On the stalls themselves every kind of liter­
ature suddenly blossomed forth in the summer
sunshine: leaflets and pamph lets by. anarchists,
Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists (t hree varieties),
the PSU and the non-committed. The yard of the
Sorbonne had become a gigantic revolutionary
d rug-store, in which the most esoteric products
no longer had to be kept beneath the counter
but could now be prominently . displayed. Old
issues of jou rnals, yellowed by the years, were
unearthed a n d often sold as well as more recent
material. Eve rywhere there were groups of 10 or
20 people, in heated discussion, people talking
about the barricades, about the CRS, about their
own. experiences, but also about the commune
of 1871, about 1905 and 1917, about the Italian
left in 1921 and about France in 1936. A fusion
was taking place between the consciousness of
the revolutionary minorities and the conscious­
ness of whole new layers of people, dragged day
by day into the maelstrom of political controver­
sy. The students were learning within days what
it had taken others a lifetime to learn. Many
lyceens came to see what it was all about. They
too got sucked into the vortex. I remember a boy
of 14 explaining to an i ncred ulous man of 6o why
students should h ave the right to depose pro­
fessors.
Other things also happened. A large piano
suddenly appeared i n the great central yard and
remained there for several days. People would
come and play on it, surrounded by enthusiastic
supporters. As people talked in the lecture the­
atres of neo-capitalism and of its techniques of
manipulation, strands ·Of Chopin and bars of
jazi:, bits of La Carmagnole and atonal composi­
tiQnS wafted through the air. One evening there
was a drum .recital, then some clarinet players
took over. These 'diversions' may have infuriated
some of the more single-minded revolutionaries,

but theY were as much part and parcel of the
total transformation of the Sorbonne as were the
revolutionary doctrine� being proclaimed in the
lecture hails.
An exhibition of huge photographs of the
'night of the barricades' (in beautiful half-tones)
appeared one morning, mounted on stands. No­
one .knew who had .put it up. Everyone agreed
that it succinctly summarised the horror and
glamour, the anger and promise of that fateful
night. Even the doors of the Chapel giving on to
the yard were soon covered with inscriptions:
'Open this door
Finis, les tabernacles'.
-' Religion is the last mystification'. Or more pro·
saically: 'We want somewhere to piss, not some·
where to pray'.
The massive outer walls of the Sorbonne
were likewise soon plastered with posters
posters announcing the first sit-in strikes,
posters describing the wage rates of whole sec·
tions of Paris workers, posters announcing the
next demonstrations, posters describing the sol·
idarity marches in Peking, posters denouncing
the. police repression and the use of CS gas (as
well as ofordinary tear-gas) against the demon·
strator's. There were posters, dozens of them,
warning students against the Communist Party's
band-wagon -jumping tactics, telling them how it
had attacked their movement and how it was
now. seeking to assume its leadership. Political
posters in plenty. But also others, proclaiming
the new ethos; A big one for instance near the
main entrance, boldly proclaimed 'Defence d'in·
terdire' .(Forbidding forbidden). And others,
equally .to the point: 'Only the truth is. revolu­
tionary', 'Our revolution · is greater than our·
selves', 'We refuse the role assigned to us, we
will not be trained as police dogs'. People's con·
cerns varied but converged. The posters reflect·
ed tlie deeply libertarian prevailing philosophy:
'Humanity will only be happy when the last cap·
italist has been strangled with the guts of the
last bureaucrat'; 'Culture is disintegrating:
Create!;; 'l take my wishes for reality for I believe
in the reality of my wishes'; or more simply,
'Creativity, spontaneity, life'.
In
street outside, hundreds of passers·
read these improvised wall·
by
gaped. Some sniggered.
loaae:a cassE�m. Some argued. Some, sum·
•

•

moning their courage, actually entered the erst·
while sacrosanct premises,- as they were being
exhorted to by numerous posters proclaiming
that the Sorbonne was now open to all. Young
workers who 'wouldn't have been seen in that
place' a month ago now walked in in groups, at
first rather self-consciously, later as if they
owned the place, which of course they did.
As the days went by, another kind of inva·
si on took place · the invasion by the cynical and
the unbelieving, or · more charitably · by those
who 'had only come to see'. lt gradually gained
momentum. At certain stages it threatened to
paralyse the serious work being done, part of
which had to be hived off to the Fatuity. of
Letters, at Censier, also occupied by the stu·
dents. lt was felt necessary, however, for the
doors to be kept open, 24 hours a day. The mes·
sage certainly spread: Deputations came first
from other universities, then from high schools,
later from factories and offices, to look, to ques·
tion, to argue, to study.
The most telling sign, however, of the new
and heady climate was to be found on the walls
of the Sorbonne corridors; Around the main lee·
tu re theatres there is a maze of such corridors:
dark, d usty, depressing, and hitherto unnoticed
passageways leading from nowhere in particular
to nowhere else. Suddenly these corridors
sprang to life in a firework of luminous mural
wisd'o in much of it of Situationist inspiration.
Hundreds of people suddenly stopped to read
such pearls as: 'Do not consume Marx. Live it';
'The future will only contain what we put into it
now'; 'When examined, we will answer with
questions'; 'Professors, you make us feel old':
'One doesn't compose with a society in decom·
position'; 'We m ust remain the u nadapted
ones'; 'Workers of all lands, enjoy yourselves';
'Those who carry out a revolution only half-way
through merely dig themselves a tomb (St Just)';
'Please leave the PC (Comm unist Party) as clean
on leaving as you would like to find it on enter·
ing'; 'The tears of the philistiiles are the nectar
of the gods'; 'Go and die in Naples, with the Club
Mediterranee'; 'Long live communication, down
with telecom m unication'; 'Masochism today
dresses up as reformism'; 'We will claim noth·
ing. We will ask for nothing. We will take. We will
occupy'; :'The only outrage to -the Tomb of the
•

•

Unknown Soldier was the outrage that put him
there'; 'No, we won't be picked up by the Great
Party of the Working Class'. And a big inscrip­
tion, well displayed: 'Since 1936 I have fought
for wage increases. My father, before me, also
fought for wage increases. Now I have a telly, a
fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet all in all, my life has
always been a dog's life. Don't discuss with the
bosses. Eliminate them.'
Day after day the courtyard and corridors
are crammed, the scene of an incessant bi-d irec­
tional flow to every conceivable part of the enor­
mous building. lt may look like chaos, but it is
the chaos of a beehive or of an anthill. A new
structure is gradually being evolved. A canteen
has been organised in one big hall. People pay
what they can afford for glasses of orange juice,
'menthe', or 'grenadine' - and for h a m or
sausage rolls. I enquire whether costs are cov­
ered and am told they more o r less break even.
I n another part of the b4ilding a children's
creche has been set up, elsewhere a first-aid
station, elsewhere a dormitory. Regular sweep­
ing-up rotas are organised. Rooms are allocated
to the Occupation Committee, to the Press
Committee, to the Propaganda Committee, to
the student/worker liaison committees, to the
committees dealing with foreign students, to the
action committees of Lyceens, to the commit­
tees dealing with the allocation of premises, and
to the numerous commissions undertaking spe­
cial projects such as the compiling of a dossier
on police atrocities, the study of the implications
of autonomy, of the examination system, etc.
Anyone seeking work can readily find it.
The composition of the committees was very
variable. lt often changed from day to day, as the
committees gradually found their feet. To those
who pressed for instant solutions to every prob­
lem it would be answered: "Patience, comrade.
Give us a chance to evolve an alternative. The
bourgeoisie has controlled this u niversity for
nearly two centuries. lt has solved nothing. We
are building from rock bottom. We need a month
or two... .
Confronted with this tremendous explosion
which it had neither foreseen nor been able to
control the Communist Party tried desperately
to salvage what it could of its shattered reputa­
tion. Between 3 May and 13 May every issue of
"

I' Humanite had carried paragraphs either
attacking the students or making slimy innuen­
d oes about them. Now the line suddenly
changed.
The Party sent dozens of its best agitators
into the Sorbonne to 'explain' its case. The case
was a simple one. The Party 'supported the stu­
dents' - even if there were a few 'dubious ele­
ments' in their leadership. lt 'always .had'. lt
always would.
Amazing scenes followed . Every Stalinist
'agitator' would immediately be surrounded by a
large group of well-informed young people,
denouncing the Party's counter-revolutionary
role. A wall-paper had been put u p by the com­
rades of Voix Ouvriere on which had been post­
ed, day by day, every statement attacking the
stud ents to have appeared iri /' Humanite or i n
any o f a dozen Party leaflets. The 'agitators'
couldn't get a word in edgeways. They would be
jumped on (non-violently). "The evidence was
over there, comrade. Would the Party comrades
like to come and read just exactly what the Party
had been saying not a week ago? Perhaps
I' Humanite would like to grant the students
space to reply to some of the accusations made
against them?" Others in the audience would
then bring u p the Party's role d uring the Algerian
War, during the miners' stril<e of 1958, d u ring the
years of 'tripartisme' (1945-1947). Wriggle as
they tried, the 'agitators' just could not escape
this kind of 'instant education'. lt was interest­
ing to note that the Party could not entrust this
'salvaging' operation to its younger, student
members. Only the 'older comrades' could safe·
ly venture into this hornets' nest. So much so
that people would say that anyone in the
Sorbonne ov�r the age of 40 was.either a cop­
per's nark or � stalinist stooge.
The most dramatic periods of the occupa­
tion were !undoubtedly the 'Assemblees
Generales', or plenary sessions, held every night
in the giant amphitheatre. This was the soviet,
the ultimate ,source of all decisions, the fount
and origin of direct democracy. The amphithe­
atre could seat u p to 5000 people in its enor­
mous hemicyde, surmounted by three balcony
tiers. As ofte � as not every seat was taken and
the crowd would flow u p the aisles and onto the
podium. A black flag and a red one hung over the

simple wooden table at which the chairman sat.
Having seen meetings of so break up in chaos it
is an amazing experience to see a meeting of
sooo get down to business. Real events d eter­
mined the themes and ensured that most of the
talk was down to earth.
The topic having been decided, everyone
was allowed to speak. Most speeches were
made from the podium but some from the body
of the hall or from the balconies. The loudspeak­
er equipment usually worked but sometimes
didn't. Some speakers could command immedi­
ate attention, without even raising their voices.
Others would instantly p rovoke a hostile
response by the stridency of their tone, their
insincerity or their more or less obvious
attempts at manoeuvring the assembly. Anyone
who waffled, or reminisced, or came to recite a
set-piece, or talked in terms of slogans, was
given short shrift by the audience, politically the
most sophisticated I have ever seen. Anyone
making practical · suggestions was listened to
attentively. So were those who sought to inter­
pret the movement in terms of its own experi­
ence or to point the way ahead.
Most s peakers were granted three minutes.
Some were allowed much more by popular
acclaim. The crowd itself exerted a tremendous
control on the platform and on the speakers. A
two-way relationship emerged very quickly. The
political maturity of the Assembly was shown
most stril<ingly in its rapid realisation that boo­
ing or cheering during speeches slowed down
the Assembly's own deliberations. Positive
speeches were loudly cheered
at the end.
Demagogic or useless ones were impatiently
swept aside. Conscious revolutionary minorities
played an important catalytic role in these delib­
erations, but never sought at least the more
intelligent ones to impose their will · on the
mass body. Although in the early stages the
Assembly had its fair share of exhibitionists,
provocateurs and nuts, the overhead costs of
direct democracy were not as heavy as one
might have expected.
There were moments of excitement and
moments of exhalation. On the night of 13 May,
after the massive march through the streets of
Paris, Daniel Cohn-Bendit confronted J M Catala.
General secretary of the Union of Communist
•

•

•

Students in front of the packed auditorium. The
scene remains printed in my mind.
"Explain to us", Cohn-Bendit said, "why the
Communist Party and the CGT told their mili·
tants to disperse · at Denfert Rochereau, why it
prevented them joining up with u s for a discus­
sion at the Champ de Mars?".
"Simple, really", sneered Catala. "The
agreement concluded between the CGT, the
CFDT, the U N EF and the other sponsoring organ·
isations stipulated that dispersal would take
place at a predetermined place. The Joint
Sponsoring Committee had not sanctioned any
further developments... "
"A revealing answer", replied Cohn-Bendit,
"the organisations hadn't foreseen that we
would be a million in the streets. But life is big­
ger than the organisations. With a million people
almost anything is possible. You say the
Committee hadn't sanctioned anything further.
On the day of the Revolution, comrade, you will
doubtless tell us to forego it 'because it hasn't
been sanctioned by the appropriate sponsoring
committee' ... .
This brought the house down. The only ones
who didn't rise to cheer were a few dozen
Stalinists. Also, revealingly, those Trotskyists
who tacitly accepted the Stalinist conceptions
and whose only quarrel with the CP is that it had
excluded them from being one of the 'sponsor·
ing organisations'.
That same night the Assembly took three
important decisions. From now on t h e Sorbonne
would constitute itself as a revolutionary head­
q uarters ('Smolny' someone shouted). Those
who worked there would devote their main
efforts not to a mere re-organisation of the edu­
cational system, but to a total subversion of
bourgeois society. From now on the University
would be .open to all those who subscribed to
these aims. The proposals having been accepted
the audience rose to a man and sang the loud·
est, most i m passioned 'lnternationale' I have
ever heard. The echoes must have reverberated
as far as the Elysee Palace on the other side of
the River Seine ...
"

·

The Censler Revolutionaries
Atthe same time as the students occupied the

'
Sorbonne, they als o took over the 'Centre
Censier' (the new Paris University Faculty of
Letters).
Censier is an enormous, ultra-modern,
steel-concrete-and-glass affair situated at the
south-east corner of the Latin Quarter. Its occu­
pation attracted less attention than did that of
the Sorbonne. lt was to prove, however, just as
significant an event. For while the Sorbonne was
the shop window ofrevolutionary Paris .:., with all
that that implies in terms of garish display
Censier was its dynamo, the place where things
really got done.
To many, the Paris May Days must have seen
an essentially nocturnal affair: nocturnal battles
with the CRS, nocturnal barricades, nocturnal
debates in the great amphitheatres. But this was
but one side of the coin. While some argued late
into the Sorbonne night, others went to bed
early for in the mornings they would be handing
out leaflets at factory gates or in the suburbs,
leaflets that had to be drafted, typed, du plicat­
ed, and the distribution of which had to be care·
fully organised. This patient, systematic work
was done at Censier. lt contributed in no small
measure to giving new revolutionary conscious­
ness articulate expression.
Soon after Censier had been occupied a
group of activists commandeered a large part of
the third floor. This space was to be the head­
q uarters of their proposed 'worker-student
action committees'. The general idea was to
establish links with groups of workers, however
small, who shared the general libertarian-revo­
lutionary outlook of this group .of students.
Contact having been made, workers and stu­
dents would co-operate in the joint drafting of
leaflets. The leaflets would discuss the immedi­
ate problems of particular groups of workers,
but in the light of What the students had shown
to be possible. A given leaflet would then be
jointly distributed by workers and students, out·
side the particular factory or office to which it
referred. In some instances the distribution
would have to be undertaken by students alone,
in others hardly a single student would be need­
ed.
What brought the Censier comrades togeth­
er was a deeply-felt sense of the revolutionary
potentialities of the situation. and the know!-

-

edge that they had no time to waste. They allfelt
the pressing need for direct action propaganda,
and that the u rgency of the situation required of
them that they transcend any doctrinal differ­
ences they might have with one another. They
were all intensely political people. By and large,
their politics were those of the new and increas­
ingly important historical species: the ex-mem­
bers of one or other revolutionary organisation.
What were their views? Basically they boiled
down to a few simple propositions. What was
needed just now was a rapid, a utonomous
development of the working class struggle, the
setting up of elected strike committees which
would link union and non-union members in all
strike-bound plants and enterprises, regular
meetings of the strikers so that fundamental
decisions remained in the hands of the rank and
file, workers' defence committees to defend
pickets from police intimidatio n , a constant diac
logue with the revolutionary students aimed at
·
restoring to the working class its own tradition
of direct democracy and its own aspiration to
self-management (auto-gestion), usurped by
the bureaucracies of the trade unions and the
political parties.
For a whole week the various Trotskyist and
Maoist factions didn't even notice what was
going on at Censier. They spent their time in
public and often acrimonious debates at the
Sorbonne as to who could provide the best lead­
ership. Meanwhile, the comrades at Censier
were steadily getting on with the work. The
majority of them had 'been through' either
Stalinist or Trotsl<yist organisations. They had
left behind them all ideas to the effect that
'intervention' was meaningful only in terms of
potential recruitment to their own particular
group. All recognised the need for a widely­
based and moderately structured revo iutionary
movement, but none of them saw the building of
such a movement as an immediate, all important
task, on which propaganda should immediately
be centred.
Duplicators belonging to 'subversive ele·
ments' were brought in. U niversity duplicators
were commandeered. Stocks of paper and ink
were obtained from various sources and by vari­
ous means. Leaflets began to pour out, first in
hundreds! then in thousands, then in te�s of

thousands as linl<s were established with one
group of rani< and file workers after another. On
the first day alone, Renault, Citroen, Air France,
Boussac, the Nouvelles Messagerires de Presse,
Rhone-Poulenc and the RATP (Metro) were con­
tacted. The movement then snowballed.
Every evening at Censier, the action commit·
tees reported bacl< to an 'Assemblee Generate'
devoted exclusively to this kind of work. The
reactions to the distribution were assessed, the
content of future leaflets discussed. These dis­
cussions would usually be led off by the worker
contact who would describe the im pact of the
leaflet on his workmates. The most heated dis­
cussion centred on whether d i rect attacks
should be m a de on the leaders of the CGT or
whether mere suggestions as to what was need­
ed to win would be sufficient to expose every­
thing the union leaders had (or hadn't) done and
everything they stood for. The second viewpoint
prevailed.
The leaflets were usually very short, never
more than 200 or 300 words. They nearly all
started by listing the workers grievances - or
just by describing their conditions of worl<. They
would end by inviting workers to call at Censier
or at the Sorbonne. "These places are now
yours. Come there to discuss your problems with
others. Tal<e a hand yourselves in mal<ing l< nown
your problems and demands to those around
you". Between this kind of opening and this kind
of conclusion, most leaflets contained one or
two key political points.
The response was instantaneous. More and
more wo'rkers dropped in to draft joint leaflets
with the students. Soon there was no lecture
room big enough for the d a i ly 'Assem blee
Generate'. The students learned a great deal
from the worl<ers' self-discipline and from the
systematic way in which they presented their
reports. it was all so different from the 'in-fight­
ing' of the political sects. There was agreement
that these were the finest lectures held at
Censier!
Among the more telling lines of these
leaflets, I noted the following:
Air France .leaflet "We refuse to accept a
degrading 'modernisation' which means
we are constantly watched and have to
submit to conditions which are harmful to
·,

our health, to our nervous system and an
insult to our status of human beings ... We
refuse to entrust our demands any longer
to professional trade union leaders. lil<e
the students, we must take the control of
our affairs into our own hands".
Renault leaflet "If we want our wage
increases and our claims concerning con­
ditions of work to be secure, if we don't
want them constantly threatened, we
must now struggle for a fundamental
change in society As workers we should
ourselves seek to control the operation of
our enterprises. Our objectives are simi­
lar to those of the students. The manage­
ment (gestion) of industry and the man­
agement of the university should be dem­
ocratically ensured by those who work
there...
Rhone-Poulenc leaflet "Up till now we
tried to solve our problems through peti­
tions, partial struggles, the election of
better leaders. This has led us nowhere.
The action · of the students has shown us
that only rank and file action could com­
pel the authorities to retreat ...the stu­
dents are challenging the whole purpose
of bourgeois education. They want to
tal<e the fundamental decisions them­
selves. So should we. We should decide
the purpose of production, and at whose
cost production will be carried out".
District leaflet (distributed in the streets
at Boulogne Billancourt) "The govern­
ment fears the extension of the move­
ment. lt fears the developing un ity
between
workers
and
students.
Pompidou has announced that 'the gov­
ernment will defend the Republic'. The
Army and police are being prepared. De
Gaulle will speak on the 24th. Will he
send the CRS to · clear pickets out of
strikebound plants? Be prepared. In
workshops and faculties, think in terms of
self-defence ...
Every day dozens of such leaflets were dis­
cussed, typed, · duplicated, distributed. Every
evening we heard ofthe response: "The b lol<es
think it's tremendous. it's just what they are
thinking. The union officials never tall< like this".
.•.

"

"

"The blokes liked the leaflet. They are sceptical
about the 12%. They say prices will go up and
that we'll lose it all in a few months. Some say
let's push all together now and take on the lot".
"The leaflet certainly started · the lads talking.
They've never had so much to say. The officials
had to wait their turn to speak...
I vividly remember a young printing worker
who said one night that these meetings were the
most exciting thing that had ever happened to
him. All his life he had dreamed of meeting peo�
pie who thought and spoke like this. But every
time he thought he had met one all they were
· interested in was what they could get out of him.
This was the first time he had been offered dis­
i nterested help.
I don't know what has happened at Censier
since the end of May. When I left, sundry Trots
were beginning to move in, "to politicise the
leaflets·" (by which I presume they meant that
the leaflets should now talk about "the need to
build the revolutionary Party"). If they succeed ­
which I doubt, knowing the calibre of the Censier
comrades - it will be a tragedy.
The leaflets were in fact political. During the
whole of my short stay in France I saw nothing
more intensely and relevantly political (in the
best sense of the term) than the sustained cam­
paign emanating from Censier, a campaign for
constant control of the struggle from below, for
self-defence, for worl<ers' management of pro·
duction, for popularising the concept of workers'
councils, for explaining to one and all the
tremendous relevance, in a revolutionary situa·
tion, of revolutionary demands, of organised
self-activity, of collective self-reliance.
As I left Censier I could not help thinking
how the place epitomised the crisis of modern
bureaucratic capitalism. Censier is no educa­
tional slum. it is an ultra-modern building, one
of the showpieces of Gaullist 'grandeur'. lt has
dosed circuit television in the lecture theatres,
modern plumbing, and slot machines distribut·
ing 24 different kinds of food - in sterilised con­
tainers - and 10 different kinds of drink. Over
90% of the students there are of petty bourgeois
or bourgeois backgrounds. Yet such is their
rejection of the society that nurtured them that
they were working duplicators 24 hours a day,
turning out a flood of revolutionary literature of
"

a kind no modern city has ever had pushed into
it before. This kind of activity had transformed
these students and had contributed to trans­
forming the environment around them. They
were simultaneously disrupting the social struc­
ture and having the time of their . lives. In the
words of a slogan scrawled on the wall: 'On n'est
pas la pour s'emmerder' (you'll have to look this
one up in the dictionary).

Getting Together
When the news of the first factory occupation
(that of the Sud Aviation plant at N a ntes)
reached the Sorbonne late .d uring the night of
Tuesday 14 May - there were scenes of inde­
scribable enthusiasm. Sessions were interrupt·
ed for the announcement. Everyone seemed fo
sense the significance of what had just hap­
pened. After a full minute of continuous, deliri­
ous cheering, the audience broke into a syn­
chronous, rhythmical clapping, apparently
reserved for great occasions.
On Thursday 16 May the Renault factories at
Cleon (near Rouen) and at Flins (North West of
Paris) were occupied. Exc .ited groups in the
Sorbonne yard remained glued to their transis­
tors as hour by hour news came over of further
occupations. Enormous posters were put up,
both inside and outside the Sorbonne, with the
most up-to-date information of which factories
had been occupied: the Nouvelles Messageries
de Presse in Paris, Kleber Colombes at
Caudebec, Dresser-Dujardin at Le Havre, the
naval shipyard at Le Trait... and finally the
Renault works at Soulogne B illancouit. Within
48 hours the task had to be abandoned. No
noticeboard - or panel of noticeboards - was
large enough. At last the students felt that the
·
battle had really been /oined.
Early on Friday afternoon an e mergency
'General Assembly' was held. The meeting
decided to send a big student deputation to the
occupied Renault works. Its aim was to establish
contact, express student solidarity and, if possi­
ble, discuss common problems. The march was
scheduled to leave the Place de la Sorbonne at
6pm.
At about spm thousands of leaflets were
suddenly distributed in the amphitheatres, in
•

the Sorbonne yard and in the streets around.
They were signed by the Renault Bureau of the
CGT. The Communist Party had been working...
fast. The leaflets read:
"We have just heard that students and
teachers are proposing to set out this afternoon
in the direction of Renault. This decision was
taken without consulting the appropriate trade
union sections of the CGT, CFDT and FO.
"We greatly appreciate the solidarity of the
students and teachers in the common struggle
against the 'pouvoir personnel' Oe de Gau lle)
and the employers, but are opposed to any ill­
judged initiative. which might threaten our devel­
oping movement and facilitate a provocation
which would lead to a diversion by the govern­
ment.
"We strongly advise the organisers of this
demonstration against proceed ing with their
plans.
"We intend, together with the workers now
struggling for thei r claims, to lead our own
strike. We refuse any external intervention, in
conformity with the declaration jointly signed by
the CGT, CFDT and FO union, and app,roved this
morning by 23,000 workers belonging to the fac­
tory".
The distortion and dishonesty of this leaflet
defy description. No-one intended to instruct the
workers how to run the strike and no student
would have the presumption to seek to assume
its leadership. All the students wanted was to
express solidarity with the workers in what was
now a . common struggle against the state and
the employing class.
The CGT leaflet came like any icy shower to
the less political students and to all those who
still had illusions about Stalinism. "They won't
let us get through". "The workers don't want to
talk with us". The identification of workers with
'their' organisation is very hard to break down.
Several hundred who had intended to march to
Billancourt were probably put off. The U N E F vac­
illated, reluctant to lead the march in direct vio­
lation of the wishes of the CGT.
Finally some 1500 people set out, under a
single banner, hastily prepared by some Maoist
students. The banner proclaimed: 'The strong
hands ofthe working class must now take over
the torch from thefragite hands ofthe students'.

Many joined the march who were not Maoists
and who did n't necessarily agree with this par­
ticular formulation of its objectives.
Although small when com pared to other
marches, this was certainly a most political one.
Practically everyone on it belonged to one or
other of the 'grou puscules': a spontaneous unit­
ed fro nt of Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists, the
comrades of the Mouvement d u 22 Mars and
various othe.rs. Everyone knew exactly what he
was doing. lt was this that i n furiated the
Communist Party.
The march set off noisi ly, crosses the
Boulevard St Michel, and passes in front of the
occupied Odeon Theatre (where several hundred
more joyfully join it). lt then proceeds at a very
brisk pace down the rue de Va ugirard, the
longest street in Paris, towards the working
class d istricts to the South West of the city,
growing steadily in size and militancy as it
advances. lt is important to reach the factory
before the Stalinists have time to mobilise their
big battalions ....
Slogans such as "Avec nous, chez Renault"
(co me with us to Renault) , "le pouvoir est dans
la rue" (power lies i n the street), "Le pouvoir aux
ouvriers" (power to the workers) are shouted
lustily, again and again. The Maoists shout "A
bas le gouvernement gaulliste anti-populaire de
chomage et de mise re" - a long and politically
equivocal slogan, but one eminently suited to
collective shouting. The lnternationale bursts
out repeatedly, sung this time by people who
seem to know the words
even the second
verse!
By the time we have marched the five miles
to lssy-les-MoulineaulX. it i s already dark. Way
behind us now are the bright lights of the Latin
Quarter and of the fashionable Paris known to
tourists. We go through small, poorly-lit streets,
the uncollected rubbish piled high in places.
Dozens of young people join us en route, attract­
ed by the noise and the singing of revolutionary
songs such as 'La )eune Garde', 'Z i m merwa l d'
and the songs of the Parisians. "Chez Renau lt,
chez Renault" the marchers shout. People con­
gregate in the doors of the bistros, or peer out of
the windows of crowded flats to watch us pass.
Some look on in amazement but many- possibly
a majority- now clap or wave encouragement. I n

some streets many Algerians line the pavement.
Some join in the shouting of "CRS· - SS";
"Charonne"; "A bas l'Etat police". They have not
forgotten. Most look on shyly or smile in an
embarrassed way. Very few join the march.
On we go, a few miles more. There isn't a
gendarme in sight. We cross the Seine and even­
tually slow down as we approach a square
beyond which lie the Renault works. The streets
here are very badly-lit. There is a sense of
intense excitement in the air.
We suddenly come up against a lorry,
parked across most of the road, and fitted with
loudspeaker equipment. The march stops. On
the lorry stands a CGT official. He speaks for five
minutes. In somewhat chilly tones he says how
pleased he is to see us. "Thank you for coming,
comrades. We appreciate your solidarity. But
please no provocations. Don't go too near the
gates as the management would use it an
excuse to call the police. And go home soon. it's
cold and you'll need all your strength in the days
to come".
The students have brought their own loud­
hailers. One or two speak, briefly. They take note
of the comments of the comrade from the CGT.
They have no intention of provoking anyone, no
wish to usurp anyone's functions. We then slow­
ly but q uite deliberately move forwards into the
square, on each side of the lorry, drowning the
protests of about a hundred Stalinists in a pow­
erful 'lnternationale'. Workers in neighbouring
cafes come out and join us. This time the Party
had not had time to mobilise its militants. lt
could not physically isolate us.
Part of the factory now looms up right ahead
of us, three storeys high on our left, two storeys
high on our right. In front of us, there is a giant
metal gate, closed and bolted. A large first floor
window to our right is crowded with workers.
The front row sit with their legs dangling over
the sill. Several seem in their teens, one of them
waves a big red flag. There are no 'tricolores' in
sight - no 'dual allegiance' as in other occupied
places I had seen. Several dozen more workers
are on the roofs of the two buildings.
We wave. They wave back. We sing the
'lnternationale'. They join in. We give the
clenched fist salute. They do likewise.
Everybody cheers. Contact has been made.

An interesting exchange takes place. A
group of demonstrators starts shouting "Les
usines aux ouvriers", (the factories to the work­
ers). The slo.gan spreads like wildfire through
the crowd. The Maoists, now in a definite minor­
ity, are rather annoyed. (According to Chairman
Mao, workers' control is a petty-bourgeois, anar­
cho-syndicalist deviation). "Les usines aux
ouvriers" ... to, 20 times the slogan reverberates
round the Place Nationale, taken up by a crowd
now some 3000 strong.
As the shouting subsides, a lone voice from
one of the Renault roofs shouts back: "La
Sorbonne aux Etudiants". Other workers on the
same roof take it up. Then those on the other
roof. By the volume of their voices there must be
at least too of them, on top of each building.
There is then a moment of silence. Everyone
thinks that the exchange has come to an end.
But one of the demonstrators starts chanting:
"La Sorbonne aux ouvriers". Amidst general
laughter, everyone joins in.
We start talking. A rope is q uickly passed
down from the window, a bucket at the end of it.
Bottles of beer and packets of fags are passed
up. Also revolutionary leaflets. Also bundles of
papers, (mainly copies of Servir Le Peuple - a
Maoist journal carrying a big title 'Vive la CGT').
At street level there are a number of gaps in the
metal fa�ade of the building. Groups of students
cluster at these half dozen openings and talk to
groups of workers on the other side. They dis­
cuss wages, conditions, the CRS, what the lads
inside need most, how the students can help.
The men talk freely. They are not Party members.
They think the constant talk of provocateurs a
bit far fetched. Butthe machines must be pro­
tected. We point out that two or three students
inside the factory, escorted by the strike com­
mittee, couldn't possibly damage the machines.
They agree. We contrast the widely open doors
of the Sorbonne with the heavy locks and bolts
on the Renault gates - closed by the CGT offi­
cials to prevent the ideological contamination of
'their militants'. How silly, we say, to have to talk
through these stupid little slits in the wall. Again
they agree. They will put it to their 'dirigieants'
(leaders). No-one seems, as yet, to think beyond
this.
There is then a diversion. A hundred yards

-�

away a member of the FER gets up on a parked
car and starts making a speech through a loud­
hailer. The intervention is completely out of tune
with the dialogue that is just starting. it's the
same gramophone record that we have been
hearing all week at the Sorbonne. "Call on the
union leaders to organise the election of strike
committees in every factory. Force the union
leaders to federate the strike committees. Force
the union leaders to set up a national strike
committee. Force them to call a general strike
throughout the whole of the country" (this at a
time when millions of workers are already on
strike without �my call whatsoever!). The tone is
strident, almost hysterical, the misjudging of the
mood monumental. The demonstrators them­
selves d rown the speaker in a loud
'l nternationale'. As the last bar fades the
Trotskyist tries again. Again the demonstrators
drown him.
Groups stroll up the Avenue Yves Kermen, to
the other entrances to the factory. Real contact
is here more difficult to establish. There is a
crowd outside the gate but most of them are
Party members. Some won't talk at aiL Other
just talk slogans.
We walk back to the sq uare. lt is now well
past midnight. The crowd thins. Groups drop
into a couple of cafes which are still open. Here
we meet a whole group of young workers, aged
about 18. They had been in the factory earlier in
the day.
They tell us that at any given time, just over
1ooo workers are engaged in the occupation.
The strike started on the Thursday afternoon, at
about 2pm, when the group of youngsters from
shop 70 decided to down tools and spread into
all parts of the factory asking their mates to do
likewise. That same morning they had heard of
the occupation of Cleon and that the red flag
was floating over the factory at Flins. There had
been a lot of talk about what to do. At a midday
meeting the CGT had spoken vaguely of a series
of rotating strikes, shop by shop, to be i nit iated
the following day.
The movement spread at an incredible pace.
The youngsters went . round shouting
"Occupation! Occupation!". Half the factory had
stopped working before the union officials
realised what was happening. At about 4pm,

Sylvain, a CGT secretary, had arrived with loud­
speaker equipment to tell them "they weren't
numerous enough, to start work again, that they
would see tomorrow about a one day strike". H e
is absolutely by-passed. At spm Halbeher, gen­
. eral secretary of the Renault CGT, announces,
pale as a sheet, that the "CGT has called for the
occupation of the factory". "Tell your friends",
the lads say. " We startedit. But will we be able
to keeJll it in our hands? Ca, c'est un autre prob­
leme...
Students? Well, hats off to anyone who can
thump the cops that hard! The lads tell us two of
their mates had disappeared from the factory
altogether 10 days ago "to help the Revolution".
Left family, jobs, everything. And good luck to
them. "A chance like this comes once in a life­
time". We discuss plans, how to develop the
movement. The occupied factory could be a
ghetto, 'isolant les d u rs' (isolating the most mil­
itant). We talk about camping, the cinema, the
Sorbonne, the future. Almost, until sunrise...
"

'Attention Aux Provocateurs'
Social upheavals, such as the one France has
just been through, leave behind them a trail of
shattered reputations. The image of Gaullism as
a meaningful way of life, 'accepted' by the
French people, has taken a tremendous knock.
But so has the image of the Communist Party as
a viable challenge to the French establishment.
As far as the students a re concerned the
recent actions of the PCF (Parti Communiste
Francais) are such that the Party has probably
sealed its fate in this milieu for a generation to
come. Among the workers the effects are more
difficult to assess and it would be premature to
attempt this assessment. All that can be said is
that the effects are sure to be profound although
they will probably take some time to express
themselves. The proletarian condition itself was
for a moment questioned. Prisoners who have
had a glimpse of freedom do not readily resume
a life sentence.
The full implications of the role of the PCF
and of the CGT have yet to be appreciated by
British revolutionaries. They need above all else
to be informed. In this section we will document

the role of the PCF to be best of o u r ability. lt is
important to realise that for every ounce of shit
thrown at the students in its official publication,
the Party poured tons more over them at meet­
ings or in private conversations. In the nature of
things it i s more difficult to document this kind
of slander.
I

Friday3 Mdy
A meeting was called in the yard of the Sorbonne
by U N E F, JCR, MAU and FER to protest at the clo­
sure of the Nanterre faculty. lt was attended by
militants of the Mouvement du 22 Mars. The
police were called in. by Rector Roche and
activists from all these groups were arrested.
The
UEC
(Union
des
Etudiants
Communistes) . didn't participate in this cam­
paign. But it d i stributed a leaflet i n the
Sorbonne denouncing the activity of the 'grou­
puscules' (abbreviation for 'groupes miniscu\es',
tl� group�.
"The leaders of the leftist groups are taking
advantage of the shortcomings of the govern­
ment. They are exploiting student discontent
and trying to stop the functioning of the facul­
ties. They are seeking to prevent the mass of
students from working and from passing their
exams. These false revolutionaries are acting
objectively as allies of the Gaultist power. They
are acting as supporters of its policies, which
are harmful to the mass of the students and in
particular to those of modest origin".
On the same day /' Humanite had written
"Certain small groups (anarchists, Trotskyists,
Maoists) composed mainly of the sons of the big
bourgeoisie and led by the German anarchist
Cohn-Bendit, are taking advantage of the short­
comings of the government ... " etc ... (see above) .
The same issue of I' Humanite had published an
article by Marchais, a member of the Party's
Central Committee. This article was to be widely
distributed, as a leaflet, in factories and offices:
"Not satisfied with the agitation they are
conducting in the student milieu - 13nd agitation
which is against the interests of the mass of the
students and favou rs fascist p rovocateurs these pseudo:revolutionaries now have the
nerve to seek to give lessons to the working
class movement. We find them in increasing
·

numbe rs (lt the gates of factories and in .places
where immigrant workers live, distributing
leaflets and other propaganda. These false revo­
. lutionaries must be unmasked, for objectively
they are serving the interests of the Gaullist
power and of the big capitalist monopolies."

Monday 6 May
The police have been occupying the Latin
Quarter over the weekend. There have been big
student street demonstrations. At the call of
U N EF and SNESup 2o,ooo students marched
from Denfert Rochereau to St Germain des Pres
calling for the liberation of the arrested workers
and students. Repeated police assaults on the
demonstrators: 422 arrested, Boo wounded.
L' Humanite states: "One can dearly see
today the outcome of the adventurist actions of
the leftist, anarchist, Trotskyist and other
groups. Objectively they are playing into the
hands of the government... The discredit into
which they are bringing the student movement
is helping feed the violent campaigns of the
reactionary press and of the ORTF, who by iden­
tifying the actions of these groups with those of
the mass of the students are seeking to isolate
the students from the mass of the population... .
"

Tuesday 7 May
U N E F and S N ESup call on their supporters to
start an unlimited strike. Before discussions
with the authorities begin they insist on:
a) a stop to all legal action against
the students and workers who have been
questioned, arrested or convicted in the
course of the demonstrations of the last
few days,
b) the withdrawal of the police from
the Latin Quarter and from all University
premises,
c) a reopening of the closed faculties.
In a statement showing how comparatively
out of touch they were with the deep motives of
the student revolt, the 'Elected Com m u nist
Representatives of the.Paris Region' declared (in
I' Humanite):
"The shortage of credits, of premises, of
equipment, of teachers ... prevent three students

out of four from completing their studies, with­
out mentioning all those. who never have access
to higher education This situation has caused
profound and legitimate discontent among both
students and teachers. lt has also favoured the
activity .of irresponsible groups whose concep­
tions can offer no solution to the students' prob­
lems. lt is intolerable that the government
should take advantage of the behaviour of an
infinitesimal minority to stop the studies of tens
of thousands of students a few days from their
exams••• .
The same issue of I' Humanite carried .. a
statement from the 'Sorbonne-L.e ttres' (teach­
ers) branch of the Com m u n i st Party: "The
Communist teachers demand the liberation of
the arrested students and the reopening of the
Sorbonne. Conscious of our responsibilities, we
specify that this solidarity does · not mean that
We agree with or support the slogans emanating
from certain student organisations. We disap­
prove of unrealistic, demagogic and anti-com­
munist slogans and of the unwarranted methods
of action advocated by various leftist groups".
On the same day Georges Seguy, general
secretary of the CGT, spoke to the Press about
the programme of the Festival of Working Class
Youth (sched uled for May 17-19, but subse­
quently cancelled): "The solidarity between stu­
dents, teachers and the working class is a famil­
iar notion to the militants of the CGT lt is pre­
cisely this tradition that compels us not to toler­
ate any dubious or provocative elements, ele­
ments which criticise the working class organi­
sations
••••

"

•••

••."

Wednesday 8 May
A big students demonstration called by the
U N E F has taken place in the streets of Paris the
previous evening. The front page of l' Humanite
carries a statement from the Party Secretariat:
"The discontent of the . students is legitimate.
But the situation favours adventurist activities,
whose conception offers no perspective to the
students and has nothing in common with a real,
ly progressive and forward-looking policy...
In the same issue, J M Catala, general secre­
tary of the U EC (Union des Etu diants
, Communistes) writes that: "the actions of irrl:!"

sponsible
groups
are
assisting
the
Establishment in its aims... What we must do is
ask for a bigger educational budget whith would
ensure bigger student grants, the appointment
of more and better qualified teachers, the build­
ing of new faculties
The
UJCF
(Union , des
)eunesses
Communistes de France) and the UJFF (Union
des ]eunes Filles Francaises) distribute a leaflet
in a n umber of lycees. L' Humanite quotes it
approvingly: "We protest against police violence ·
unleashed against the students. We demand the
reopening of the Nanterre and of the Sorbonne
and the liberation of all those a rrested. We
denounce the Gaullist poweras being mainly (!)
responsible for this situation. We also denounce
the adventurism of certain irresponsible groups
and call on the lyceens to fight side by side with
the working <;lass and its Communist Party
·

• • •"

•••"

Monday 13 May
Over the weekend Pompidou has climbed down.
But the unions, the U N E F and the teachers have
decided to maintain their call for a one day gen­
eral strike.
On its front page I' Humanite publishes, in
enormous headlines, a call for the 24 hour strike
followed by a statement from the Political
Bureau:
"The unity of the working class and of the
students threatens the regime This creates an
enormous problem. lt is essential that no provo­
cation, .no diversion should be allowed to d ivert
any of the forces struggling against the regime
or should give the government the flimsiest pre­
text to distort the meaning of this great fight.
The Communist Party associates itself without
reservation with the just struggle of the stu:
dents
•••

•••"

Wednesday 15 May
The enormous Monday demonstrations in Paris
and other towns which incidentally prevented
I' Humanite as well as other papers from a ppearc
ing on the Tuesday - were a tremendous suc­
cess. In a sense they triggered off the 'sponta­
neous' wave of strikes which followed within a
day or two. L' Humanite publishes, on its front

page, a statement issued the day before by the
Party's Political Bureau. After taking all the cred­
it for May 13, the statement continues:
"The People of Paris marched for hours in
the streets of the capital showing a power which
made any provocation impossible. The Party
organisations worked day and night to ensure
that this great demonstration of workers, teach­
ers and students should take place in maximum
unity, strength an d discipline... lt is now clear
that the Establishment confronted with the
protests and collective action of all the main sec­
tions of the population, will seek to divide us in
the hope of beating us. lt will resort to all meth­
ods, including provocation. The Political Bureau
warns workers and students against any adven­
turist endeavours which might, in the present
circumstances, dislocate the broad front of the
struggle which is in the process of developing,
and provide the Gaullist power with an unex­
pected weapon with which to consolidate its
shaky rule ...
"

Saturday 18 May
Over the past 48 hours, strikes with factory
occupations have spread like a trail of gunpow­
der, from one corner of the country to the other.
The railways are paralysed, civil airports fly the
red flag. (Provocateurs have obviously been at
world)
L' Humanite publishes on its front page a
declaration from the National Committee of the
CGT: "From hour to hour strikes and factory
occupations are spreading. This action, started
on the initiative of the CGT and of other trade
union organisations (sic!), creates a new situa­
tion of exceptional importance .... Long-accumu­
lated popular discontent is now finding expres­
sion. The q u estions being asked m ust be
answered seriously and full notice taken of their
importance. The evolution of the situation is giv­
ing a new dimension to the struggle ... While mul­
tiplying its efforts to raise the struggle to the
needed level, the National Committee warns all
CGT militants and local groups against any
attempts by outside groups 'to meddle in the
conduct of the struggle, and against all acts of
provocation which might assist the forces of
repression in their attempts to thwart the devel-

opment of the movement ...
The same issue of the paper devoted a
whole page to warning students of the fallacy of
any notions of 'student power' en passant
attributing to the 'Mouvement du 2 2 Mars' a
whole series of political positions they never
held.
"

-

-

Monday 20 May
The whole country is totally paralysed. The
Communist Party is still warning about 'provoca­
tions'. The top right hand corner of I' Humanite
contains a box labelled "WARNING". "Leaflets
have been distributed in the Paris area calling
for an insurrectionary general strike. lt goes
without saying that such appeals have not been
issued by our democratic trade union organisa�
tions. They are the work of provocateurs seeking
to provide the government with a pretext for
intervE!ntion ... The workers must be vigilant to
defeat all such manoeuvres ..."
In the same issue, Etienne Fajon of the
Central Committee, continues the warnings:
"The Establishment's main preoccupation at the
moment is to divide the ranks of the working
class and to divide it from other sections of the
population ... Our political Bureau has warned
workers and students, from the very beginning,
against adventurist slogans capable of dislocat­
ing the broad front of the struggle. Several
provocations have thus been prevented. Our
political vigilance must clearly be maintained...
The same issue devoted its central pages to
an interview of Mr Georges Seguy, general sec­
retary of the CGT, conducted over the Europe No.
1 radio network. In these live interviews, various
listeners phoned q uestions in directly. The fol­
lowing exchanges are worth recording:
Question "Mr Seguy, the workers on strike
are everywhere saying that they will go the
whole hog. What do you mean by this? What are
your objectives?"
Answer "The strike is so powerful that the
workers obviously mean to obtain the maximum
concessions at the end of such a movement. The
whole hog for us trade unionists, means winning
the demands for which we have always fought,
but which the government and the employers
have always refused to consider. They have
"

opposed an obtuse intransigence to the propos­
als for negotiations which we have repeatedly
made.
The whole hog means a general rise in
wages (no wages less than 6oo francs per
month), guaranteed employment, an earlier
retirement age, reduction of working hours with­
out loss of wages and the defence and extension
of trade union rights within the factory. I am not
putting these demands in any particular order
because we attach the same importance to all of
them".
Question "If I am not mistaken the statutes
of the CGT declare its aims to be the overthrow
of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.
In the present circumstances, that you have
yourself referred to as 'exceptional' and 'impor·
tant', why doesn't the CGT seize this unique
chance 10f calling for its fundamental objec­
tives?"
Answer "This is a very interesting question.
I like it very much. lt is true that the CGT offers
the workers a concept of trade unionism that we
consider the most revolutionary insofar as its
final objective is the end of the employing class
and of wage labour. lt is true that this is the first
of our statutes. it remains fundamentally the
CGT's objective. But can the present movement
reach this objective? If it became obvious that it
could, we would be ready to assume our respon­
sibilities. lt remains to be seen whether all the
social strata involved in the present movement
are ready to go that far".
Question "Since last week's events I have
gone everywhere where people are arguing. I
went this afternoon to the Odeon Theatre.
Masses of people were discussing there. I can
assure you that all the classes who suffer from
the present regime were represented there.
When I asked whether people thought that the
movement should go further than the small
demands put forwards by the trade unions for
the last 10 or 20 years, I brought the house
down. I therefore think that it would be criminal
to miss the present opportunity. lt would be
criminal because sooner or later this will have to
done. The conditions of today might allow u s to
do it peacefully and calmly and will perhaps
never come back. I think this call must be made
by you and the other political organisations.

These political "Organisations are not your busi·
ness, of course, but the CGT is a revolutionary
organisation. You must bring out your revolu­
tionary flag. The workers are astounded to see
you so timid".
Answer "While you were bathing in the
Odeon fever, I was in the factories. Amongst
workers. I assure you that the answer I am giving
you is the answer of a leader of a great trade
union, which claims to have assumed all its
responsibilities, but which does not confuse its
wishes with reality".
A caller "I would like to speak to Mr Seguy.
My name is Duvauchel. I am the director of the
Sud Aviation factory at Nantes".
Seguy "Good morning, sir".
Duvauchel "Good morning, Mr G en eral
Secretary. I would like to know what you think of
the fact that for the last four d ays I have been
sequestrated, together with about 20 other
managerial staff, inside the Sud Aviation factory
at Nantes".
Seguy "Has anyone raised a hand against
you?"
Duvauche/ "No. But I am prevented from
leaving, despite the fact that the general manag­
er of the firm has intimated that the firm was
prepared to make positive proposals as soon as
free access to its factories could be resumed,
and first of all to its managerial staff".
Seguy "Have you asked to leave the factory?"
Duvauche/ "Yes!"
Seguy "Was permission refused?"
Duvauchel "Yes!"
Seg uy "Then I must refer you to the declara­
tion that I made yesterday at the CGT's press
conference. I stated that I disapproved of such
activities. We are taking the necessary steps to
see that they are not repeated".
But enough is enough. The Revolution itself
will doubtless be denounced by the Stalinists as
a provocation! By way of an epilogue it is worth
recording that at a packed meeting of revolu·
tionary students, h e ld at the Mutualite o n
Thursday 9 May, a spokesman o f the Trotskyist
organisation Comm u niste lnternationaliste
could think of nothing better to do than call a
meeting to pass a resolution calling on Seguy to
call a general strike!!!

E

France, 1968
This has undoubtedly been the greatest revolu­
tionary upheaval in Western Europe since the
days of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of thou­
sands of students have fought pitched battles
with the police. Nine million workers have been
on strike. The red flag of revolt has flown over
occupied factories, universities, building sites,
shipyards, primary and secondary schools, pit
heads, railway stations, department stores,
docked transatlantic liners, theatres, hotels. The
Paris Opera, the Folies Bergeres and the build­
ing of the National Council for Scientific
Research were taken over, as were the head­
quarters of the French Football Federation whose aim was clearly perceived as being 'to
prevent ordinary footballers enjoying football'.
Virtually every layer of French society has
been involved to some extent or other. Hundreds
of thousands of people of all ages have dis­
cussed every aspect of life in packed-out, non­
stop meetings in every available schoolroom
and lecture hall. Boys of 14 have invaded a pri­
mary school for girls shouting "Liberte pour \es
filles". Even such traditionally reactionary
enclaves as the Faculties of Medicine and Law
have been shaken from top to bottom , their hal­
lowed procedures and institutions challenged
and found wanting. Millions have taken a hand
in making history. This is the stuff of revolution.
Under the influence of the revolutionary stu­
dents, thousands began to query the whole prin­
ciple of hierarchy. The students had questioned
it ·where it seemed the most 'natural': in the
realms of teaching and knowledge. They pro­
claimed that democratic self-management was
possible and to · prove it began to practice i t
themselves. They denounced the monopoly of
information and produced millions of leaflets to
break it. They attacked some of the main pillars
of contemporary 'civilisation': the barriers
between manual workers and intellectuals, the
consumer so ciety, the 'sanctity' of the university
and of other founts of capitalist culture and wis­
dom.
Within a matter of days the tremendous cre­
ative potentialities of the people suddenly
erupted. The boldest and most realistic ideas
ahd they are usually the same · were advocated,

argued, applied. Language, rendered stale by
decades of b u reaucratic mumbo-jumbo, eviscer­
ated by those who manipu late it for advertising
purposes, suddenly reappeared as something
new and fresh . People reappropriated it in all its
fullness. Magnificently apposite and poetic slo­
gans emerged from the anonymous crowd.
Children explained to their elders what the func­
tion of education should be. The ed ucators were
educated. Within a few days, young people of 20
attained a level of understanding and a political
and tactical sense which many who had been in
the revolutionary movement for 30 years or
more were still sadly lacking.
The tumultuous development of the stu­
dents' struggle triggered off the first factory
occupations. lt transformed both the relation of
forces in society and the image, in people's
minds, of established institutions and of estab·
lished leaders. it compelled the State to reveal
both its oppressive nature and its fundamental
incoherence. lt exposed the utter emptiness of
Government, Parliament, Administration and of
ALL political parties. Unarmed students had
forced the Establishment to drop its mask, to
sweat with fear, to resort to the police club and
to the gas grenade. Students finally compelled
the b u reaucratic leaderships of the 'working
class organisations' to reveal themselves as the
ultimate custodians of the established order.
But the revolutionary movement did still
more. lt fought its battles in Paris, not in some
under-developed country, exploited by imperial­
ism. In a glorious few weeks the actions of stu­
dents and young workers dispelled the myth of
the well-organised, well-oiled modern capitalist
society, from which radical conflict had been
eliminated and in which only marginal problems
remained to be solved. Administrators who had
been administering everything were suddenly
shown to have had a grasp of nothing. Planners
who had planned everything showed them­
selves incapable of ensuring the endorsement of
their plans by those to whom they applied.
This most modern movement should allow
real revolutionaries to shed a number of the ide·
ological encumbrances which in the past ham·
pered revolutionary activity. it wasn't hunger
w hich d rove the students to revolt. There wasn't
an 'economic crisis' even in the loosest sense of
•

the word. The revolt had nothing to do with
'under-consumption' or with . 'over-production'.
The 'falling rate of profit' just didn't come into
the picture. Moreover, the student movement
wasn't based on economic demands. On the
contrary, the movement only found its . real
stature, and o n ly evoked its tremendous
response, when it went beyond the economic
demands within which official student unionism
had for so long soughtto contain it (incidentally
with the blessing of all the political parties and
'revolutionary' groups of the 'left'). And con­
versely it was by confining the workers' struggle
to purely economic objectives that the trade
union bureaucrats have so far succeeded in
coming to the assistance of the re_gime.
The present movement has shown that the
fundamental contradiction of modern bureau­
cratic capitalism isn't the 'anarchy of the mar­
ket'. lt isn't the 'contradiction between the
forces of production and the property relations'.
The central conflict to which all others are relat­
ed is the conflict between order-givers
(dirigeants) and order-takers (executants). The
insoluble contradiction which tearsthe guts out
of modern capitalist society is the one which
compels it to exclude people from the manage­
ment of their own activities and which at the
same time compels it to solicit their participa­
tion, without which .it would collapse. These ten­
dencies. find expression on the one hand ·in the
attempt of the bureaucrats to convert men into
objects (by violence, mystification, new manipu­
lation techniques - or 'economic carrots') and,
on the other hand, in mankind's refusal to allow
itself to be treated in this way.
The French events show clearly something
that all revolutions have shown, .but which
appc;trently has again and again to be learned
anew. There is no 'in-built revolutionary per­
spective', no 'gradual increase of contrad.ic­
tions', no . 'progressive development of a revolu­
tionary mass consciousness', What are given are
the contradictions and the conflicts we have
described and the fact that modern bureaucratic
society more or less inevitably produces period­
ic 'accident s' which disrupt its functioning.
These both provoke · popular interventions and
provide the people with opportunities for assert­
ing themselves and for changing the social

order. The functioning of bureauc�afic ca p italism
creates the conditions within which revolution­
ary consciousness may appear. These condi­
tions are an integral part of the whole alienating
hierarchical and oppressive social structure.
Whenever people struggle, sooner or later they
are compelled to question the whole of that
social structure:
.
These are the ideas . which many of us in
Solidarity have. long subscribed to. They were
developed at length in some of Paul Card an's
pamphlets. Writing in Le Mon9e

(20 May 1968)

E

Morin admits that what is happening today in
France is "a blinding resurrection: the resurrec­
tion of that libertarian strand which seeks con­
ciliation with marxism, in a formula of which
Socialisme ou Barbarie had provided a first syn­
thesis a few years ago ... " As after every verifica­
tion of basic concepts in the .crucible of real
events, many will proclaim that these had
always been their views. This, of course isn't
true. 1 The point however i.s n't to lay claims to a
kind of copyright in the realm of correct revolu­
tionary ideas. We welcome converts, from what·
ever source and however belated.
We can't deal here at length with what is
now an i mportant problem in France, namely the
creation of a new kind of revolutionary move­
ment. Things would indeed have been different
if such a movement had existed, strong enough
to outwit the bureaucratic manoeuvres alert
enough day by day to expose the duplicity of the
' left' leaderships, deeply enough implanted to
explain to the workers the real meaning .of the
students' struggle, to propagate the idea . of
autonomous strike comm ittees (linking up union
and non-union members), of workers' manage­
ment of production and of workers'. councils.
Many things which could have been done
weren't done because there wasn't S!Jch a move­
ment: The way the students' own struggle was
unleashed shows. that such an 'organ isation
could have played a most important catalytic
role without automatically. becomi n g a bu reau­
cratic 'leadership'. But such regrets are futile.
The non-existence of such a movement is no
accident. If it had been formed during the previ­
ous period it certainly wouldn't have b e en the
kind of movem�nt of which we are speaking.
Even taking the 'best' of the small organisation •.

and m u ltiplying its numbers a hundredfold wouldn't have met the requirements of the cur­
rent situation. When confronted with the test of
events all the 'left' groups just continued playing
their old gramophone records. Whatever their
merits as depositories of the cold ashes of the
revolution - a task they have now carried out for
several decades - they proved incapable of
snapping out of their old ideas and routines,
incapable of learning or forgetting anything. 2

The new revolutionary movement will have
to be built from the new elements (students and
workers) who have understood the real signifi­
cance of current events. The revolution must
step into the great political void revealed by the
crisis of the old society. lt must develop a voice,
a face, a paper - and it must do it soon.
We can understand the reluctance of some
students to form such an organisation. They feel
there is a contradiction between action and
thought, between spontaneity and organisation.
Their hesitation is fed by the whole of their pre­
vious experience. They have seen how thought
could become sterilising dogma, organisation
become bureaucracy or lifeless ritual, speech
become a means of mystification, a revolution­
ary idea become a rigid and stereotyped pro­
gramme. Through their actions, their boldness,
their reluctance to consider long-term aims, they
have broken out of this straight-jacket. But this
isn't enough.
Moreover many of them had sampled the
traditional 'left' groups. In all their fundamental
aspects these groups remain trapped within the
ideological and organisational frameworks of
bureaucratic capitalism. They have programmes
fixed once and for all, leaders who utter fixed
speeches, whatever the changing reality around
them, organisational form which mirror those of
existing society. Such groups reproduce within
their own ranks the division between order-tak­
ers and order-givers, between those who 'know'
and those who don't, the separation between
scholastic pseudo-theory and real life. They
would even like to impose this division into the
working class, whom they aspire to lead,
because (and I was told this again and again)
"the workers are only capable of developing a
trade union consciousness".
But these students are wrong. One doesn't

get beyond bureaucratic organisation by deny­
ing all organisation. One doesn't challenge the
sterile rigidity of finished programmes by refus­
ing to define oneself in terms of aims and meth­
ods. One doesn't refute dead dogma by the con­
demnation of all theoretical reflection. The stu�
dents and young workers can't just stay where
they are. To accept these 'contradictions' as valid
and as something which cannot be transcended
is to accept the essence of bureaucratic capital­
ist ideology. lt is to accept the prevailing philos­
ophy and the prevailing reality. ltis to integrate
the revolution i nto an established historical
order.
If the revolution is only an explosion lasting
a few days (or weeks), the established order whether it knows it or not - will be able to cope.
What is more - at a deep level - class society
even needs such jolts. This kind of 'revolution'
permits class society to survive by compelling it
to transform and adapt itself. This is the real
danger today. Explosions which disrupt the
imaginary world in which alienated societies
tend to live - and bring them momentarily down
to earth - help them eliminate outmoded meth­
ods of domin,ation and evolve new and more
flexible ones.
Action or thought? For revolutionary social­
ists the problem is not to make a synthesis of
these two preoccupations of the revolutionary
students. lt is to destroy the social context in
which such false alternatives find root.
Solidarity, 1968
1 We recall for instance a long review of Modern

Capitalism and Revolution in International Socialism
(No 22) where, under the heading 'Return to Utopia',

Card an was deemed to have "nothing to say in relation
to theory". His prediction that people would eventually
reject the emptiness of the consumer society were
described as "mere moralising" and as "doing creditto
a Christian ascetic". The authors should perhaps visit

the new monastery at the Sorbonne.

2 We are not primarily referring to trotskyist groups
such as the FER, which on the night of the barricades,
despite repeated appeals for help, refused to cancel
their mass meeting at the Mutualite or to send rein­
forcements to assist students and workers already
engaged in a bitter fight with the CRS on the barricades

. of the rue Gay lussac. We are not referring to their
leader Chisseray who claimed it was "necessary above
all to preserve the revolutionary vanguard from an
unnecessary massacre". Nor are we referring to the
repeated maoist criticisms of the students' struggle,
uttered as late as 7 May. What we are referring to is the
inability of any Trotskyist or Maoist group to raise the
real issues demanded in a revolutionary situation, ie to
call for workers' management of production and the
formation of workers' councils. None of these groups
even touched on the sort of question the revolutionary
students were discussing day and night: the relations
of production in the capitalist factory, alienation at
work whatever the level of wages, the division between
'
leaders and led within the factory hierarchy or within
the 'working class' organisations themselves. All that
Humanite Nouvel/e could counterpose to the constant­
ly demobilising activities of the CGT was the immense­
ly demystifying slogan: "Vive le CGT" ("The· CGT isn't
really what it appears to be, com rade"), All that Voix
Ouvriere could counterpose to the CGT's demand for a
minimum wage of 6oo francs was... a minimum wage of
1000 francs. This kind of revolutionary auction (in pure­
ly economic demands), after the workers had been
occupying the factories for several weeks, shows the
utter bankruptcy of revolutionaries who fail to recog­
nise a revolution. Avant Garde correctly attacked some
of the ambiguities of auto-gestion (self-management)
as advocated by the CFDT, but failed to point out the
deeply revolutionary implications of the slogan.

Workers Beware!

Text of a CGT poster, placarded all over Boulogne Billancourt:

For some months the most diverse publications have been distributed by elements recruited in a m ilieu foreign to the working class.
.
The authors of these articles remain anonymous most of the time, a fact which . fully
illustrates their dishonesty. They give the most weird and tempting titles to their papers,

The titles may vary but the content has a common objective: to lead the workers away
from the CGT and to provoke divisions in their ranks, in order to weaken them.
At night, their commandos tear up our posters. Every time they distribute something
at the gates, the police are not far off, ready to protect their distribution, as was the case

recently at LMT. Recently they attempted to invade the offices of the Labour Exchange at
Boulogne. Their activities are given an exaggerated publicity on the Gaullist radio and in
the columns of the bourgeois press.

This warning is no doubt superfluous for the majority of Renault workers, who, in the
past, have got to know about this kind of agitation. On the other hand the younger workÂ­
ers m ust be told that these elements are in the service of the bourgeoisie, who have
always made use of these pseudo-revolutionaries whenever the rise of united left forces
has presented a threat to its privileges.
lt is therefore important not to allow these people to come to the gates of our factory,

to sully our trade union organisation and our CGT m ilitants. who are tirelessly exerting
themselves in defence of o u r demands and to bring about unity. These elements always

reap a fat reward at the end of the day fo r their d irty work, and for the loyal services given
to the bosses (some now occupy high positions in the management of the factory).
This having been said, the CGT (Renault} Committee calls on the workers to continue
the fight for their demands, to intensify their efforts to ensure greater unity of the trade
union and democratic forces, and to strengthen the ranks of the CGT struggling for these
noble objectives:

The Trade Union Bureau, CGT, Renault

*This is a fascist publication; all the others are 'left' public'ations. A typical amalgam technique.

®

The Decline & Fall of the "Spectacular" Commodity- Economy
From the 13th to the 16th of August, 1965, the
blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident
involving traffic police and pedestrians devel­
oped into two days of spontaneous riots. The
forces of order, despite repeated reinforcement,
were unable to gain control of the streets. By the
third day, the negroes had armed themselves by
pillaging such arms shops as were accessible,
and were so enabled to open fire on police heli­
copters. Thousands of soldiers - the whole mili­
tary weight of an infantry division, supported by
tanks - had to be thrown into the struggle before
the Watts area could be surrounded, after which
it took several days and much street fighting for
it to be brought under control. The rioters didn't
hesitate to plunder and burn the shops of the
area. The official figures testify to 32 dead,
including 27 negroes, plus Soo wounded and
3,ooo arrested.
Reactions on all sides were invested with
clarity: the revolutionary act always discloses
the reality of existing problems, lending an
u naccustomed and unconscious truth to the var­
ious postures of its opponents.Police Chief
William Parker, for example, refused all media­
tion proposed by the main Negro organisations,
asserting correctly that the rioters had no
leader. Evidently, as the blacks were without a
leader, this was the moment of truth for both
parties. What did Roy Wilkins, general secretary
of the NAACP, want at that moment ? He
declared that the riots should be put down "with
all the force necessary". And the Cardinal of Los
Angeles, Mclntyre, who protested loudly; had
not protested against the violence of the re pres­
sion, which one would have supposed the subtle
thing to do, at the moment of the aggiornamen­
to of the Roman church; instead, he protested in
the most urgent tones about "a premeditated
revolt against the rights of one's . neighbour;
respect for the law and the maintenance of

order", calling upon catholics to oppose the
plundering and the apparently unjustified vio­
lence. All the theorists and "spokesmen" of the
international Left (or, rather of its nothingness)
deplored the irresponsibility and disorder, the
pillaging and above all the fact that arms and
alcohol were the first targets for plunder; finally,
that 2,ooo fires had been started by the Watts
gasoline throwers to light up their battle and
their ball. But who was there to defend the riot­
ers of Los Angeles in the terms they deserve?
Well, we shall. Let us leave the economists to
grieve over the 27 million dollars lost, and the
town planners over one of their most beautiful
supermarkets gone up in smoke, and Mclntyre
over his slain Deputy Sheriff; let the sociologists
weep over the absurd ity and the intoxication of
this rebellion. The job of a revolutionary journal
is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents,
but to help u ncover their just reasons: to explain
theoretically the truth for which such practical
action expresses the search.
In Algiers in J uly, 1965, following
Boumedienne's coup d' etat, the situationists
published an Address to the Algerians and to
revolutionaries all over the world, which inter- .
preted conditions in Algeria and in the rest of the
world as a whole; among their examples, they
evoked the American negroes, who if they could
"affirm themselves significantly" would unmask
the contradictions of the most advanced of capi­
talist systems. Five weeks later, this significance
found an expression on the street. Theoretical
criticism of modern society, in its advanced
forms, and criticism in

actions

of the same soci­

ety, co-exist at this moment: still separated but
both advancing towards the same reality, both
talking of the same thing. These two critiques
are mutually explanatory, each being incpmpre­
hensible without the other. Our theory of "sur­
vival" and the "spectacle" is illuminated and ver-

ified by these actions so unintelligible to the
American false cons,ciousness. One day these
actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.
U p to this time the Negro "Civil Rights"
demonstrations. had been kept by their leaders
within the limits of a legal system which over­
looked the most appaling violence on the part of
the police and the racists: in Alabama the previ­
o us March for instance, at the time of the
Montgomery March, and as if this scandal was
not sufficient, a discreet agreement between the
Federal gover n ment, Governor Wallace and
Pastor King had led the Selma Marchers of the
1oth of March to stand back at the first request,
in dignity and prayer. Thus the confrontation
expected by the crowd had been reduced to the
charade of a merely potential confrontation. I n
that moment, Non-Violence reached the pitiful
limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to
the enemies' blows, then force your mora l
grandeur t o t h e point o f sparing h i m the trouble
of using more force. But the basic fact is that the
civil rights movement, by remaining within the
law, only posed legal problems. lt is logical to
make an appeal to the law legally. What is not
logical is to appeal legally against a patent ille­
gality as if this contradiction would disappear if
pointed out. for it is clear that the superficial
and outrageously visible illegality from which
the blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socio-ecoriomic contradiction
which existing laws simply cannot touch, and
which n o future juridical law will be able to get
rid of in face of more basic cultural laws of the
society: and it is against these that the negroes
are at last daring to raise their voices and. asking
the right to live. In reality, the American negro
wants the total subversion of that Society or
nothing.
The problem of this necessity for subversion
arises of its own accord the moment the blacks
start using subversive means: the changeover to
such methods happens on the level of their daily
life, appearing at one and the same time as the
most accidental and the most objectively justi·
•

•

fied development. This issue is no longer the

status of the American negro, but the status of
America, even if this happens to find its first
expression among the negroes. This was not a
racial conflict: the rioters left certain whites that

were in their path alone, attacking only the
white policemen: similarly, black solidarity did
not extend to black shopkeepers, not even to
black car-drivers. Even Luther King, in Paris last
October, had to admit that the limits of his com­
petence had been overshot: "They were not race
riots," he said, "but one class."
The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion
against commodities and of worker consumers
hierarchically subordinated to commodity val­
ues. The negroes of Los Angeles like the young
delinquents of all advanced countries, but more
radically because at the level of a class globally
deprived of a future, a sector of the proletariat
unable to believe in significant chance of inte·
gration and promotion take modern capitalist
propaganda literally, with its display of afflu­
ence. They want to possess immediately all the
objects shown and made abstractly accessible:
they want to make use of them. That is why they
reject the values of exchange, the commodity­
reality which is its mold, its purpose and its final
goal, which has prese/ected everything. Through
theft and gift they retrieve a use which at once
gives the lie to · the oppressive rationality of
commodities, disclosing their relations a n d
invention t o be arbitrary and u n necessary. The
plunder of the Watts sector was the most simple
possible realisation of the hybrid principle: "To
each according to his (false) needs" needs
determined and produced by the economic sys·
tem, which the act of pillaging rejects.
But the fact that the vaunting of abundance
is taken at its face value and discovered in the
immediate instead of being eternally pursued in
the course of alienated labour and in the face of
increasing but unmet social needs this fact
means that real needs are expressed in carnival,
playful affirmation and the potlatch of destruc·
tion. The man who destroys commodities shows
his h u man superiority over commodities. H e
frees himself from the arbitrary forms which
cloak his real needs. The flames of Watts con·
sumed the system of consumption! The theft of
large refrigerators by people with no electricity,
o r with their electricity cut off, gives the best
possible metaphor for the life of affluence trans­
formed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer
bought, the commodity lies open to criticism
and modification, and this under whichever of its
•

•

•

•

forms it may appear. Only so long as it is paid for
with money, as a status symbol of survival, can it
be worshiped fetishistically. Pillage is the natu­
ral response to the affluent society: the afflu­
ence, however, is by rio means natural or h uman
- it is simply abundance of goods. Pillage, more­
over, which instantly destroys commodities as
such, discloses the ultima ratio of commodities,
namely, the army, the police imd the other spe­
cialised detachments which have the monopoly
of armed force within the State. What is a police­
man ? He is the active servant of commodities,
the man in complete submission to commodi­
ties, whose job is to insure that a given product
of h uman labour remains a commodity with the
magical property of having to be paid for instead
of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle - a mute,
passive insensible thing, itself in submission to
the first corner to make use of it. Over and above
the indignity of depending on a policeman, the
blacks reject the indignity of depending on com­
modities. The Watts youth, having no future in
market terms, grasped another quality of the
present, and the truth of that present was so
irresistible that it drew on the whole population,
women, children, and even sociologists who
happen e d to find themselves on the scene. A
young negro sociologist of the district, Bobbi
Hollon, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in
October: "Before, people were ashamed to say
they came from Watts. They'd m umble it. Now,
they say it with pride. Boys who always went
around with their shirts open to the waist, and
who'd have cut you into strips in half a second,
used to apply here every morning. They organ­
ised the distribution of food. Of course it's no
good pretending the food wasn't plundered ... All
that Christian blah has been used too long
against the negroes. These people could plun­
der for ten years and they wouldn't get back half
the money that has been stolen from them all
these years. Myself, I'm just a little black girl."
Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash from
her sandals the blood that splashed them during
the rioting, adds: "All the world looks to Watts
now."
How do 'men make history, starting from the
conditions pre-established to persuade them
not to take a hand in it? The Los Angeles negroes
are better paid than any others in the U.S., but it

is also here that they are furthest behind that
high point of affluence which is California.
Hollywood, the pole of the worldwide specta c le,
is in their immediate vicinity. They are promised
that, with patience, they will join in America's
prosperity, but they realise that this prosperity is
not a static sphere but rather a ladder without
end. The higher they climb, the further they get
from the top, because they don't have a fair
start, because they are less qualified and thus
more numerous among the unemployed, and
finally because the hierarchy which crushes
them is not one based simply on buying power
as a pure economic fact: an essential inferiority
is i mposed on them in every area of daily life by
the customs and prejudices of a society in which
all human power is based on buying power. So
long as the h uman riches of the American negro
are despised and treated as criminal, monetary
riches will never make him acceptable to the
alienated society of America: individual wealth
may make a rich negro but the negroes as a
whole must represent poverty iri a society of
hierarchised wealth. Every witness noted this
cry which proclaims the fundamental meaning of
the rising: 'This is the Black Revolution, and we
want the world to know it!" Freedom now! is the
password of all h istorical revolutions, but here
for the first time it is not poverty but material
abundance which must be controlled according
to new laws. The control of abundance is not just
changing the way it is shared out, but redefining
its every orientation, superficial and profound
alike. This is the first skirmish of an enormous
struggle, infinite in its implications.
The blacks are not isolated in their struggle
because a new proletarian consciousness the
consciousness of not being the master of one's
activity, of one's life, in the slightest degree - is
taking form in America among strata whose
refusal of modern capitalism resembles that of
the negroes. Indeed, the first phase of the negro
struggle has been the signal to a movement of
opposition which is spreading. In December,
1964 the students of Berkeley, frustrated in their
participation in the civil rights movement, ended
u p by calling a strike to oppose the system of
California's "multiversity", and by extension the
social system of the U.S., in which they are allot­
ted such a passive role. Immediately, drinking
-

and drug orgies were uncovered among the siu­
dents - the sam·e supposed activities for which
the negroes have long been castigated. This
generation of students has since invented a new
form of struggle against the dominant spectacle,
the teach-in, a form taken up by the Edinburgh
students on October 2oth apropos of the
Rhodesian crisis.' This clearly . imperfect and
· primitive type of opposition represents the
stage of discussion which refuses to be limited
in time (academically), arid in this its logical out­
come is a progression to practical activity. Also
in o.c tober, thousands of demonstrators
appeared in the streets of . Berkeley and New
York, their cries echoing those. of the Watts riot:
ers: "Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!"
The whites, becoming more radical, have
stepped· outside the law: "courses" are given on
how to defraud the recruiting boards, draft cards
are burned and the act televised. ln the affluent
society, disgust for affluence and for its price is
Onding expression. The spectacle is being .spat
on by an· advanced sector whose autonomous
activity denies its values. The classical proletari­
at, to the extent to which it had been provision­
ally integrated into the capitalist system, had
itself failed to integrate the negroes (several Los
Angeles unions refused negroes until 1959);
now, the negroes are the rallying point for all
those who refuse the logic of integration into
that system - integration into capitalism being of
course the ne plus ultra of all integration prom­
ised. And comfort will never be comfortable
enough for those who seek what is not on the
market - or rather, that which the market elimi­
nates. The level reached by the tech nology of
the most privileged becomes an insult - and one
more easily expressed than that . most basic
insult, which is reification. The Los Angeles
rebellion is the first in history able to justify
itself by the argument that there was no air con­
ditioning during a heatwave.
The American negro has his own particular
spectacle, his press, magazines, coloured film
stars, and if the blacks reaiise this, if they spew
out this spectacle for its phoneyness, as an
expression of their unworthiness, it is because
they see it to tie a m_inority spectacle - nothing
butthe appendage of a general spectacle. They
recognise that-this parade of their consumption-

to-be-desired is a colony of the white one, and
thus they see through the lie c;>f this total eco­
nomico-cultural spectacle more q u ickly: By
wanting to participate really and immediately in
affluence - and this is an official value of every
American - they demand the equalitarian reali­
sation of the American spectacle of everyday
life: they demand that the half-heaven ly, half­
terrestrial values of this spectacle be put to the
test. But'it is of the essence of the spectacle that .
it cannot be made real either immediately or
eq ually; and this, not even for the whites. (In
fact, . the function of the negro in terms of the
spectacle is to serve as the perfect prod: in the
race for riches, such underprivilege is an incite­
ment to am bition.) ln taking the capiialist spec­
tacle at its face value the negroes are already
rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a
d rug for slaves. it is not supposed to be taken l i t­
erally, but followed at just a few paces' distance;
if it were not for this albeit tiny distance, it would
become total mystification. The fact is that in the
U.S. today the whites are enslaved to commodi­
ties while the negroes negate them. The blacks
ask for more . than the whites - that is the core of
an insol u ble problem, or rather one only soluble
through the dissolution of the white social sys­
tem. This is why those whites who want· to
escape their own servitude must needs rally to
the negro cause, not in a solidarity based on
colour, obviously, but i n a global rejection of
commodities and, in the last analysis, of the
State. The economic and social backwardness of
the negroes allows them to see what the white
consumer is, and their justified contempt for the
white is nothing but contempt for any passive
consumer. Whites who cast off their role have no
chance unless they link their struggle more and
more to the negro's struggle, uncovering his real
and coherent reasons and supporting them until
the end. If such an accord were to be ruptured at
a radical point in the battle, the result would be
the. formation of a black nationalism.· and a con­
frontation between the two splinters exactly
after the fashion of the prevailing system. A
phase of mutual extermination is the other pos­
sible outcome of the present situation, once res­
ignation is overcome.
The attempts to build a black nationalism,
separatist and p ro-African as, they are, are
·

'·

dreams g1v1ng no answer to the reality of
oppression The American negro has no father­
land. He is in his own country and he is alienat­
ed: so is the rest of the population, but the
blacks differ insofar as they are aware of it. ln
this sense, they are not the most backward sec­
tor of their society, but the most advanced. They
are the negation at work, "the bad aspect pro­
ducing the movement which makes history by
setting the struggle in motion". (Marx: The
Poverty of Philosophy). Africa has nothing to do
with it.
The American negroes are the product of
modern industry, just as are electronics, adver­
tising or the cyclotron. And they carry within
them its contradictions. These are the men
whom the spectacle-paradise must integrate
and repulse simultaneously, so that the antago­
nism between the spectacle and the real activity
of men surrenders completely to their enuncia­
tions. The spectacle is universal in the same way
as the commodities. But as the world of com­
modities is based in class conflict, commodities
are themselves hierarchic. The necessity of com­
modities · and hence of the spectacle whose job
it is to inform about commodities - to be at once
universal and hierarchic leads to a universal
hierarchisation. But as this hierarchisation must
remain unavowed, it is expressed il'l the form of
u nacknowledgeable hierarchic value judge­
ments, in a world of reasonless rationalisation.
lt is this process which creates racialisms every­
where: the English Labour government has just
restrained coloured immigration, while the
industrially advanced countries of Europe are
once again becoming racialist as they import
their sub-proletariat from the Mediterranean
area, so exerting a colonial exploitation within
their borders. And if Russia continues to be anti­
semitic, it is because she is still a society of hier­
archy and commodities, in which labour must be
bought and sold as a commodity. Together, com­
modities and hierarchies are constantly renew­
ing their alliance, which extends its influence by
modifying its form: it is seen just as easily in the
relations between trade unionist and worker as
between two car owners with artificially distin·
guished models. This is the original sin of com­
modity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois
reason, whose legacy is bureaucracy. But the

·

repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies and
the fact that the whole world strength of com­
modities is directed blindly and automatically
towards their protection, leads us to see - the
moment we engage on a negating praxis - that
every hierarchy is absurd.
The rational world produced by the industri­
al revolution has rationally liberated individuals
from their local and national limitations, and
related them on a world scale; but denies reason
by separating them once more, according to a
hidden logic which finds its expression in mad
ideas and grotesque value-systems. Man,
estranged from his world, is everywhere sur­
rounded by strangers. The barbarian is no longer
at the ends of the earth, he is on the spot, made
into a barbarian by this very same forced partic­
ipation in hierarchised consumption. The
humanism cloaking. all this is opposed to man,
and the negation of his activity and his desires;
it is the humanism of commodities, expressing
the benevolence of the parasite, merchandise,
towards the men off whom it feeds. For those
who reduce men to objects, objects seem to
acquire human qualities, and manifestations of
real human activity appear as unconscious ani­
mal behaviour. Thus the chief humanist of Los
Angeles, William Parker, can say: "They started
behaving like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo."
When the state of emergency was declared
by the California authorities, the insurance com­
panies recalled that they do not cover risks at
that level: they guarantee nothing beyond sur­
vival. Overall, the American negroes can rest
assured that, if they keep quiet, their survival is
guaranteed; and capitalism has become suffi­
ciently centralised and entrenched in the State
to distribute "welfare" to the poorest. But sim­
ply because they are behind in the process of
intensification of socially organised survival, the
blacks present problems of life and what they
demand is not to survive but to live. The blacks
have nothing to insure of their own; they have to
destroy all the forms of security and private
insurance known up to now. They appear as
what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies
- not of the vast majority of Americans - but of
the alienated way of life of all modern society;
the most advanced country industrially only
shows us the road that will be everywhere fol-

!owed unless the system is overthrown.
Certain black .nationalist . extremists, in
showing why they could never accept less than a
separate State, have advanced the argu ment
that American society, even if it someday con·
cedes total civic and economic equality, will
never get around to accepting mixed marriages.
it is therefore this American society which must
disappear, not only in America but everywhere in
the world. The end of all racial prejudice (like the
end of so many other prejudices such as sexual
ones related to inhibitions) can only lie beyond
"marriage" itself: that is, beyond the bourgeois
family (which is q uestioned by the American
negroes). This is the rule as much in Russi11 as in
the United States, as a model of hierarchic re la·
tions and of the stability of an inherited power
(be it money or soda-bureaucratic status). lt is
now often said that American youth, after thirty
years of s ilence, is rising again as a force of
opposition, and that the black revolt is their
Spanish Civil War. This time, its " Lincoln
Battalions" must understand the full signifi·
cance of the struggle in which they engage, sup·
porting it up to the end of its universal implica·
tions. The "excesses" of Los Angeles are no
more a political error in the Black Revolt than the
armed resistance of the P.O.U.M in Barcelona,
May 1937, was a betrayal of the anti-Franquist
war. A rebellion against the spectacle is situated
on the level of the totality, because even were
it only to appear in a single d istrict, Watts it is
a protest by men against the inhuman life,
because it begins at the level of the real single
individual, and because com munity, from which
the individual in revolt is separated, is the true
social nature of man, human nature: the positive
transcendence of the spectacle.
•

·

Guy Debord
Situationist International, December 1965

Documents
ING D U R I NG THE 6 MAY RIOT

Communique
Comrades,
Considering that the Sud-Aviation factory at
Nantes has been occupied' for two days by the
workers and students of that �ity, and thattoday
the movement is spreading to several factories
(Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne
· in Paris, Renault in Cleon, etc), THE SORBO N N E
OCCUPATION COMMITTEE calls for the immedi'
ate occupation of all the factories in France and
the formation of Workers Councils.
Comrades, spread and reproduce this
appeal as quickly as possible.

Occupation Committee of the Autonomous and
Popular Sorbonne University, 26 May 1968, 7 .oo
pm

Since the only purpose of a revolutionary organ­
isation is the abolition 'of all existing classes.in a
. way that does not bring about a new division of
society, we consider any organisation revolu­
tionary which consistent/yand effectively works
toward the internatfonal ,realisation of the
.
absolute power of the workers co uncils, as pre­
figured in the experienc.e of the proletarian revolutions of this century,
Such an organisation makes a unitary cri'
tique of the world, !>r is nothing. By unitary cri­
tique we mean a comprehensive critique of all
geographical areas where V�Jrious forms of sep­
arate socioeconomic powers exist, as well as a
comprehensive critique of all aspects of life.
Such an · organisation sees the beginning
and end of its program in the complete decolohi­
sation of everyday life . . it thus aims not at the
mas�es' self-management of the existing world,
but at its U J1 i nterrupted transformation. it
embodies the radical critique of political econo­
my, the supersession of the commodity and of
wage labour.
Such an <org<i!riisation refuses to reproduce
within itself any of the hierarchical conditions of
the dominant wo.rld. The only liinit to participat­

. HU MANITY WON'T B� HAPPY TILL THE LAST
BU REAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH TH E GUTS OF TH E
LAST CAPITALIST
DEATH TO THE COPS
FREE ALSO THE 4 GUYS CONVICTED FOR LOOT-

must have recognised and appropriated the
coherence of its critique. This coherence must
be both in tlie critical the o ry proper and in the
relationship between this theory and practical

·

Sorbonne, 26 May 1968, J.JO pm

Slogans to be spread now by every
.means

·

·

·

·

(Leaflets, announcements over microphones,
comic strips, songs, graffiti, balloons on paint­
ings in the Sorbonne, announcements in the­
atres during films or while disrupting them, bal­
loons on subway billboards,before making love,
after making love, in elevators, each time you
raise your glass in a bar):

·

ing in its total democracy is that each member

·

activity. The organisation radically criticises
every ideology as separate power of ideas and
as ideas ofseparate power. lt is thus at the same
time the negation of any remnants of religion,
and of the prevailing social spectacle which,
from news media to mass culture, monopolizes
communication between people around their
unilateral reception of images·of their alienated
activity. The organisation dissolves any 'revolu­
tionary ideology' u n masking it as a sign of the
failure of the revolutionary project, as the pri­
vate property of new specialists of power, as one
more fraudulent representation setting itself
above real proletarianised life.
Since the ultimate criterion of the modern
revolutionary organisation is its totalness, such
an organisation is u ltimately a critique of poli­
tics. lt must explicitly aim to dissolve itself as a
separate organisation at its moment of victory.
Adopted by the 7th Conference of the 51, July

1966

A gu't of wind through the Japanese
apple tree
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Henri Lefebvre, one of the most well-known
agents of recuperation of this half of the century
(it's well-known how the situationists well and
truly put him and the whole Arguments gang in
their place in their pamphlet Into the Dustbin of
History!) proposes to add the Zengakuren to his
trophies. The CNRS has its emissaries, PRAXIS
has its researchers.
The metaphilosopher Lefebvre is less stupid
than the pataphilosopher Morin. But the
metastalinist ought to have the good grace to
shut up when it's a matter of class struggle.
A word to the wise is enough.
The Enrages, Nanterre, March

19, �968

Gut rage!
Comrades,
In spite of the proven collusion between U EC
Stalinists and reactionaries, last Friday's marvel-

lous riots show that students, in struggle, are
starting to gain a consciousness that they didn't
have before: and where violence begins,
reformism ends. The University Council which
met this morning will have its work cut out: this
obsolete form of repression can do nothing to
counter the violence in the streets. The banning
for Five years of our comrade Gerard Bigorgne
from all the u niversities of France - quietly
ignored by the whole of the press, the political
groups, and students' associations - and which
now menaces our comrade Rene Riesel and six
other Nanterre students, is at the same time a
way for the u niversity authorities to hand them
over to the police.
Faced with repression, the struggle which
has begun must retain its method of violent
action, which for the time being is its only
streugth. But above all it must instigate a con­
sciousness amongst students who will lead the
movement forward.
Because there aren't only the cops: there
are also the lies of the various political tenden­
cies - Trotskyists OCR, FER, VO), Maoists (UJCML,
CP rank and file), and anarchists-a-la-Cohn­
Bendit. Let's settle our business ourselves!
The example shown by the comrades arrest­
ed at the Sorbonne on Friday, who escaped from
the van they'd been taken to, is an example to
follow. When there are only three cops in a
police van, we'll know what to do. The case of
Sergeant Brunet, done over yesterday, will set a
precedent: death to the pigs!
Already violence has shut the mouths of the
petty bosses of the political groups; to chal­
lenge the bourgeois university alone is trivial
when it's the whole of this sociey which is to be
destroyed.
LONG LIVE THE ZENGAKUREN!
LONG LIVE. TH E VANDALIST COMMITTEE OF PUB­
LIC SAFETY (Bordeaux)!
LONG LIVE TH E ENRAGES!
LONG LIVE TH E S.l.!
LONG LIVE TH E SOCIAL REVOLUTION!
The Enrages, Paris, May 6,

1968

The castle is burning!
Address to the Council ofthe University of Paris

Relics of the past,
Your crass ignorance of life gives you no authoriy
to do anything. Do you want proof? If you can sit
today it will only be if you are backed up by a
cordon of police.
In fact nobody respects you any more. So
cry now over your old Sorbonne.
lt just makes me laugh that certain mod­
ernising old farts are getting touchy about
defending me, supposing - wrongly - that after
having spat in their faces, I might once more
become presentable enough for them to protect
me. Despite their perseverance in such
masochism, these opportunists wouldn't even
know how to patch up the Universly. Monsieur
Lefebvre, I say to you, shit.
There will be more and more of those who
take from the education system the best thing it
has: the grants. You've refused this to me, so I've
had nothing to hide. I've got to bite the bullet.
Today's trial is, of course, a ridiculous fairy
tale. The real trial took place on Monday on the
streets, and secular justice has already detained
about thirty riotes. For my comrades, what mat­
ters is the unconditional release of all the pris­
oners (as well as the students).
Freedom is the crime which contains all
crimes. Woe betide feudal justice when the cas­
tle is burning!
Rene Riese/, Paris, May 10, 1968

Vigilance!
Comrades,
The supremacy of the revolutionary assem­
bly can only mean something if it exercises its
power.
For the last 48 hours even the capaciy of the
general assembly to make decisions has been
challenged by a systematic o bstru cti o n of all
proposals for action.
Up until now no motion could be voted on or
even discussed, and bodies elected by the gen­
eral assembly (Occupation Committee and

Coordinating Committee) see their work sabo­
taged by pseudo-spontaneous groups.
All the debates on organisation, which peo­
ple wanted to argue about before any action, are
pointless if we do nothing.
AT THIS RATE, TH E MOVEMENT WILL B E
B U R I E D I N THE SORBO N N E!
The prerequisite of direct democracy is the
minimum support that revolutionary students
can give to revolutionary workers who are occu­
pying their factories.
it is inexcusable that yesterday evening's
incidents in the GA should pass without retalia­
tion.
The priests are holding us back when anti­
clerical posters are torn up.
The bureaucrats are holding us back when,
without even giving their names, they paralyse
the revolutionary awareness that can take the
movement forward from the barricades.
Once again, it's the future that is sacrificed
to the re-establishment of the old unionism.
Parliamentary cretinism wants to take over
the rostrum, as it tries to put the old, patched-up
system back on its feet again.
Comrades,the reform of the university alone
is insignificant, when it is the whole of the old
world which is to be destroyed.
The movement is nothing if it is not revolu­
tionary.
·

Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, May 16,
1968, 4.3opm.

Watch outl
The Press Committee situated on the second
floor, stair C, in the Gaston Azard library, repre­
sents only itself. lt happens to be a case of a
dozen or so student journalists anxious to prove
themselves straight away to their future employ­
'ers and future censors.
This Committee, which is trying to monopo­
lize all contact with the Press, refuses to trans­
m it the communiques of the regularly elected
bodies of the general assembly.
TH IS PRESS COMMITTEE IS A CENSORS H I P
COMMITTEE: don't have anything more t o d o
with it.

1 107

The varlous working parties can, while wait­
ing for this evening's general assembly where
new decisions will be taken, address themselves
to the occupation committee and the coordinat­
ing committee elected by the GA yesterday
evening.
EVERYBODY COME TO THE G E N E RAL
ASSEMBLY THIS EVE N I NG IN ORDER TO TH ROW
OUTTHE BUREAUCRATS!
Occupation Committee of the autonomous and
popular The Sorbonne, May 16, spm

Watch out for manipulators!
Watch out for bureaucrats!
Comrades,
No-one must be unaware of the Importance
of the GA this evening (Thursday 16 May). For
two days individuals one recognizes from having
seen them previously peddling their party lines
have succeeded in sowing confusion and in
smothering the GAs under a barrage of bureau­
cratic manipulatlons whose clumsiness clearly
demonstrates the contempt they have
- for this
a�emb�
This assembly must learn to make itself
respected, or disappear. Two points must be dis­

cussed above all:
WHO IS IN CHARG E OF THE MARSHALS?
whose disgusting role is intolerable.
WHY IS TH E PRESS COMMITTEE - which
dares to censor the communiques that it is
charged to transmit to the agencles - composed
of apprentice journalists who are careful not to
disappoint the ORTF bosses or jeopardize their
future job possibilities?
Apart from this: as the workers are begin­
ning to occupy several factories in France, FOL­
LOWING O U R EXAMPLE AN D WITH THE SAME
RIGHT WE HAVE, the Sorbonne occupatlon com­
mittee issued a statement approving of this
movement at 3 pm this afternoon. The central
problem of the present GA is therefore to declare
itself by a clear vote supporting or disavowing
this appeal of its occupation committee. In the
case of a disavowal, this assembly will then have
taken the responsibility of reserving for the stu­
dents a right that it refuses to the working class;

and in that case it is clear that it will no longer
want to concern itself with anything but · a
Gaullist reform o f the university.
Occupation Committee of the autonomous and
popular Sorbonne University, 16 May 1968,
6.Jopm

Telegrams
17 MAY 1968 I PROFESSOR IVAN SVITAK
PRAG UE CZECHOSLOVAKIA I THE OCCUPATION
COMMITTEE OF THE AUTONOMOUS AND POPU­
LAR SORBON N E S EN DS FRATERNAL SALUTA·
TIONS TO COMRADE SVITAK AN D TO CZECHO­
SLOVAKIAN REVOLUTIONARIES STOP LONG LIVE
THE I NTERNATIONAL POWER OF TH E WORKERS
COU NCILS STOP H U MAN ITY WON'T BE HAPPY
TILL THE LAST CAPITALIST IS H U NG WITH THE
GUTS OF THE LAST B U REAUCRAT STOP LONG
LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM
17 MAY 1968 I ZENGAKU REN TOKYO JAPAN I
LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF TH E JAPANESE
COMRADES WHO HAV E OPEN E D COMBAT
S I M U LTAN EOUSLY ON TH E FRONTS OF ANTI­
STALI N ISM AN D ANTI-IMPERIALISM STOP LONG
LIVE FACTORY OCCUPATIONS STOP LONG LIVE
THE G EN ERAL STR I KE STOP LONG LIVE THE
I NTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WO RKERS
COU NCILS STOP H U MAN ITY WON'T B E HAPPY
TILL THE LAST B U REAUCRAT IS H U NG WITH THE
Gl.JTS OF TH E LAST CAPITALIST STOP OCCU PA­
TION COMMITTEE OF THE AUTONOMO U S AND
' POPULAR SORBON N E
1 7 MAY 1968 I POLITBURO OF TH E COMMUN IST
PARTY OF TH E USSR THE KREML I N MOSCOW I
SHAKE IN YOU R SHOES B U R EAUCRATS STOP
TH E I NTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS
COU NCILS WI LL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP
H U MAN ITY WON'T BE HAPPY T I LL THE LAST
B U R EAUCRAT IS. H U NG WITH THE G UTS OF THE
LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUG­
G LE OF TH E KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF TH E
MAKHNOVS H CH I NA AGAiNST TROTSKY A N D
LEN I N STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 (OUNCI LIST
I N S U R R ECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN
WITH THE STATE STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTION-

Report o n the occupation of the
SQrbonne
The occupation of the Sorbonne that began
Monday, 13 May, has inaugurated a new period
in the crisi s of modern society. The events now
taking place in France foreshadow the return of
the proletarian revolutionary movement in all
countries. The movement that had already
advanced from theory to struggle in the streets
has now advanced to a struggle for power over
the means of production. Modernized Ci'!Pitalisrn
thaught it had finished with class struggle it's
started up again! The proletariat no longer existed - but here it is again.
In surrendering the Sorbonne, the govern­
ment counted .on pacifying the student revolt,
which had already succeeded in holding a sec­
tion of Paris behind its barricades an entire night
before being recaptured with great difficulty by
the police. The Sorbonne was given overto the
students in the hop e that they would p eacefully
•

·

discuss their university problems. But the occu­
piers immediately decided to open it to the pub­
lic to freely discuss the general problems of the
society. This was thus a prefiguration of a coun­
cil, a council in which even the students broke
out of their miserable studenthood and ceased
to be students.
To be sure, the occupation has never been
total: a chapel and some remnants of adminis·
trative offices have been tolerated. The democ­
.
racy has never been complete: future . teth·
nocrats of the U N E F clai�d to be making them·
selves useful and other political bureaucrats
have also tried their manip1:1lations. Workers'
participation has remained very limited and the
presence of nonstudents soon began to be
questioned. Many students; professors, journal­
ists and imbeciles of other occupations have
come as spectators.
In spite of all these deficiencies, which are
not surprising considering the contradiction
between the scope of the project and the nar­
rowness of the student milieu, the exemplary
nature of the best aspects nf this situation
immediately took on an explosive sigmficance.
Workers could not fail to be inspired by seeing
free discussion, the striving for a radical critique
and d irect democracy in action. Even limited ta a
Sorbonne liberated from the state, this was a
revolutionary program developing its own forms.
The day after the occupation of the Sorbonne
the Sud·Aviation workers of Nantes occupied
their factory. On the third day, Thursday the 16th,
the Renault factories at Cleon and Flins were
occupied and the movement began at the N M PP
and at Boulogne-Billancourt, starting at Shop
70. N ow, at the end of the week, 100 factories
have been occupied while the wave of strikes,
acce p ted but never initiated by the union
bureaucracies, is paralyzing the railroads and
developing toward a general strike.
The only power in the Sorbonne was the
general assembly of its occupiers. At its first ses­
sion, on 14 May, amidst a certa in confusion, it
had elected an Occupation Committee of 15
members revocable by it each day. Only one of
the delegates, belonging to the N anterre-Paris
Enrages group, had set forth a program: defence
of d irect . de m ocracy in the Sorboime and
absolute power of workers' councils as ultimate

goal. The next d ay's general assembly reelected
its entire Occupation Committee, which had not
been able to accomplish anything by then. In
fact, all the specialised groupings that had set
themselves up in the Sorbonne followed the
directives of a hidden "Coordination Committee"
composed of volunteer and very moderating
organizers responsible to no one. An hour after
the reelection of the Occupation Committee one
of the "coordinators" privately tried to declare it
dissolved. A direct appeal to the base in the
courtyard of the Sorbonne aroused a movement
of protests which obliged the manipulator to
retract himself. By the next day, Thursday the
16th, thirteen mem bers of the Occupation
Committee had disappeared, leaving two com­
rades, including the Enrages member, vested
with the only delegation of power authorized by
the general assembly and this at a time when
the gravity of the moment necessitated immedi­
ate decisions: democracy was constantly being
flouted in the Sorbonne and factory occupations
were spreading. The Occupation Committee, ral­
lying around it as many Sorbonne occupiers as it
could who were determined to maintain democ·
racy there, at 3pm launched an appeal for "the
occupation of all the factories in France and the
formation of workers' councils." To disseminate
this appeal, the Occupation Committee had at
the same time to restore the democratic func­
tioning of the Sorbonne. lt had to take over or
recreate from scratch all the services that were
supposed to be under its authority: the loud­
speaker system, printing facilities, i nterfaculty
liaison, security. lt ignored the squawking com­
plaints of the spokesmen of various political
groups OCR, Maoists, etc.), reminding them that
it was responsible only to the general assembly.
lt intended to report to it that very evening, but
the Sorbonne occupiers' unanimous decision to
march on Renault·Billancourt (whose occupa·
tion we had learned of in the meantime} post­
poned the session of the assembly unti1 2pm the
next day.
During the night, while thousands of corn·
rades were at Billancourt, some · unidentified
persons i mp rovised a general assembly, which
broke u p when the Occup ation Committee, hav�
ing learned of its existence, sent back two dele·
gates to call attention to its illegi timacy.
•

Friday the 17th at 2pm the regular assembly
saw its rostrum occupied for a long time by self·
appointed marshals belonging to the FER; and in
addition had to interrupt the session for the sec­
ond march on Billancourt at 5 pm.
That evening at 9 p m , the Occu pation
Committee was finally able to present a report of
its activities. lt was cpmpletely unsuccessful,
however, in getting Its actions discussed and
voted on, in particular its appeal for the occupa­
tion of the factories, which .the assembly did not
tal<e the responsibility of either d isavowing or
approving. Confronted with such indifference
and confusion, the Occupation Com m ittee had
no choice but to withdraw. The assembly
showed itself just as incapable of protesting
against a new invasion oUhe rostru m by the FER
troops, whose putsch seemed to be aimed at
countering the provisional alliance of ]CR and
U N E F b u reaucrats. The partisans of d i rect
democracy immediately declared that they no
longer had anything to do at the Sorbonn�.
At the very moment that the example of the
occupation is beginning to be taken up in the
factories it is collapsing at the Sorbonne. This is
all the more serious since the workers have
against them a b ureaucracy infinitely. more
entrenched than that of the student or leftist
amateurs. In addition, the leftist bureaucrats,
echoing the CGT in the hope of being accorded a
little marginal role alongside it, abstractly sepa­
rate the workers from the students, whom "they
don't need lessons from." But in fact the stu­
dents have already given a lesson to the workers
precisely by occupying the Sorbonne and briefly
initiating a really democratic discussion. All the
bureaucrats tell us demogogically that the work­
ing class is grown u p, in order to hide the fact
that it is. en,hained - first of all by them (now or
in their future hopes, depending on which group
they're in). They counterpose their lying serious­
ness to "the festival�' in the Sorbonne, but it was
precisely this festiveness that btire within itself
the only thing that is serious: the radicat'critique .
of prevailing conditions.
The student struggle is now left behind.
Even more left behind are all the second-string
bureaucratic leaderships that think it's a gQod
idea to feign respect for the Stalinists at this
very moment when the CGT and the so-called
·

·

1 111

'

·

"Communist" Party are trembling. The outcome
of the present crisis is in the hands of the work·
ers themselves if they succeed in accomplishing
in the occupation of their factories the goals
toward which the university occupation was only
able to make a rough gesture.
The comrades who su pported the first
Sorbonne Occupation Committee - the Enrages­
Situationist International Committee, a number
of workers and a few students - have formed a
Council for Maintaining. the Occupations: the
maintaining of the occupations obviously being
conceivable only through their quantitative and
qualitative extension, which must not spare any
existing regime.
·

Council for maintaining the occupations, Paris,
19 May 1968

For the power of the Workers
Councils
In the space of ten days workers have occupied
hundreds of factories, a spontaneous genl'!ral
strike has totally interrupted the activity of the
country, and de facto committees have taken
over many buildings belonging to the state. In
such a situation - which in any event cannot last
but m ust either extend itself or d isappear
(through repression or defeatist negotiations) all the old ideas are swept aside and all the rad­
ical hypotheses on the return of the revolution­
ary, proletarian movement are confirmed. The
fact that the whole movement was really trig­
gered five months ago by a half dozen revolu­
tionaries of the "Enrages" group reveals even
better how much the objective conditions were
already present. At this very moment the French
example is having repercussions in other coun­
tries and reviving the internationalism which is
indissociable fr.om the revolutions of our centu­
ry.
The fundamental struggle today is between,
on the one hand, the mass of workers - who do
not have direct means of expressing themselves
- and on the other, the leftist political and union
bureaucracies that (even if merely on the basis
of the 14°/o of the active population that is
unionised) control the factory gates and the

right to negotiate in the name of the occupiers.
These bureaucracies are not workers' organisa­
tions that have degenerated and betrayed the
workers, they are a mechanism for integrating
the workers i nto capitalist society. In the present
crisis they are the main protection of this shak­
en capitalism.
The de Gaulle regime may negotiate - essen­
tially (if only indirectly) with the PCF-CGT - for
the demobilization of the workers in exchange
for some economic advantages; after which the
radical currents would be repressed. Or "the
left" may come to power and pursue the same
policies, though from a weaker position. Or an
armed repression may be attempted. Or, finally,
the workers may take the upper hand by speak­
i ng for themselves and becoming conscious of
goals as radical as the forms of struggle they
have already put into practice. Such a process
would lead to the formation of workers councils
making decisions democratically at the rank­
and-file level, federating with each other by
means of delegates revocable at any moment,
and becoming the sole deliberative and execu­
tive power over the entire country.
In what way could the prolongation of the
present situation lead to such a prospect?
Within a few days, perhaps, the necessity of
starting certain sectors of the economy back up
again under workers' control could lay the bases
for this new power, a power which everything is
already pushing to burst through the constraints
of the unions and parties. The railroads ahd
printshops would have to be put back into oper­
ation for the needs of the workers' struggle. New
de facto authorities would have to requisition
and distribute food. If money becomes devalued
it might have to be replaced by vouchers backed
by those new authorities. lt is through such a
practical process that the consciousness of the
profound will of the proletariat can impose itself
- the class consciousness that lays hold on his­
tory and brings about the workers' domination
over all aspects of their own lives.
Council for maintaining the occupations, Paris,
22 May 1968

Address to all workers
Comrades,
What we have already done in France is
haunting Europe and will soon threaten all the
ruling classes of the world, from the bureaucrats
of Moscow and· Peking to the millionaires of
Washington and Tokyo. In the same way we have
made Paris dance, the international proletariat
will again take up its assault on the capitals of
all states, on all the citadels of alienation. The
occupation of factories and public buildings
throughout the country has not only blocked the
functioning of the economy, it has brought about
a general questioning of the society. A deep­
seated movement is leading almost every sector
of the population to seek a real change of life. lt
is now a revolutionary movement, a movement
which lacks nothing but the consciousness of
what it has already done in order to triumph.
What forces will try to save capitalism? The
regime will fall unless it threatens recourse to
arms (accompanied by the promise of new elec­
tions, which could only take place after the
capitulation of the movement) or even resorts to
immediate armed repression. As for the possible
coming to power of the left, it too will try to
defend the old world through concessions and
through force. In this event, the best defender of
such a "popular government" would be the so­
called "Communist" Party, the party of Stalinist
bureaucrats, which has fought the movement
from the very beginning and which began to
envisage the fall of the de Gaulle regime only
when it realised it was no longer capable of
being that regime's main guardian. Such a tran­
sitional
government would
really . . be
"Kerenskyist" only if the Stalinists were beaten.
All this will depend essentially on the workers'
consciousness and capacities for autonomous
organisation: those who have already
rejected the ridiculous accords-that so gratified
the union leaders need only discover that they
cannot "win" much more within the framework
of the existing economy, but that they can take
everything by transforming all the bases of the
economy on their own behalf. The bosses can
hardly pay more; but they can disappear.
The present movement did not become
"politicised" by going beyond the miserable

union demands regarding wages and pensions,
demands which were falsely presented as
"social questions." lt is beyond politics: it is
posing the social question in its simple truth.
The revolution that has been in the making for
over a century is returning. lt can assert itself
only in its own forms. lt is already too late for a
bureaucratic-revolutionary patching up. When a
recently de-Stalinized Andre Barjonet calls for
the formation of a common organisation that
would bring together "all the authentic forces of
revolution ... whether they march under the ban­
ner of Trotsky or Mao, of anarchy or situation ism
(we have only to recall that those who today fol­
low Trotsky or Mao, to say nothing of the pitiful
"Anarchist Federation) have nothing to do with
the present revolution. The bureaucrats may
now change their m inds about what they call
"authentically revolutionary"; authentic revolu­
tion does not have to change its condemnation
of bureaucracy.
At the present moment, with the power they
hold and with the parties and unions being what
they are, the workers have no other choice but to
organise themselves in unitary rank-and-file
committees directly seizing all aspects of the
reconstruction of social life, asserting their
autonomy vis-a-vis any sort of politico-unionist
leadership, ensuring their self-defence and fed­
erating with each other region ally and
nationally. By taking this path they will become
the sole real power in the country, the power of
the workers councils. Otherwise the proletariat,
because it is "either revolutionary or nothing"
will again become a passive object. lt will go
back to watching television.
What defines the power of the councils?
Dissolution of all external power; direct and
total democracy; practical unification of decision
and execution; delegates who can be revoked at
any moment by those who have mandated them;
abolition of hierarchy and independent speciali­
sations; conscious management and transfor­
mation of all the conditions of liberated life; per­
manent creative participation of the masses;
internationalist extension and coordination. The
present requirements are nothing less than this.
Self-management is nothing less. Beware of the
recuperators of every modernist variety - includ­
ing even priests - who are beginning to talk of

self-management or even of workers councils
without acknowledging this minimum, because
they in fact want to save their b u reaucratic func­
tions, the privileges of their intellectual speciali­
sations or their future as petty bosses!
In reality what is necessary now has been
necessary since the beginning of the proletarian
revolutionary project. People struggled for the
abolition of wage labour, of commodity produc­
tion, of the state. lt was a matter of acceding to
conscious history, of suppressing all separations
and "everything that exists independently of
individuals." Proletarian revolution has sponta­
neously sketched out its adequate form in the
councils, in St. Petersburg in 1905 as in Turin in
1920, in Catalonia i n 1936 as in B udapest in
1956. The maintaining of the old society, o r the
formation of new exploiting classes, hi!s each
time been by way of the s u ppression of the
councils. Now the working class knows its ene­
mies and its own appropriate methods of action.
"Revolutionary organisation has had to learn
that it can no longer fight alienation with alien­
ated forms" (The Society of the Spectacle).
Workers councils are clearly the only solution,
since all the other forms of revolutionary strug­
gle have led to the opposite of what was aimed
at.
Enrages-Situationist International Committee
Council for maintaining the occupations, Paris,
30 May 1968

The struggle against alienation has to give the words their real meaning as well as to return to them their initial force

deformation (at the level of the world racket and its mystificaÂˇ
tions)
hard labour
that's how much?
masturbation
shit that is used as a permanent gargle by an the pedantic
idiots (see professor)
my Love
croak bastard
croak bastard
croak bastard
croak bastard
trap for assholes
sterilisation
preventive police
strategic hamlets
last chanceof neocapitalism whose glaring failures are covered
up by official lies, which are clumsily plastered over the most
obvious contradictions.

Students, you are impotent fools (we know that already),
but you will remain it as long as you will not have
-beaten up your professors
-buggered all your priests
, -set fire to the university
No the Commune is not dead.

Vandalist' s departfliJent for Public Welfare - Leaflet issued at Bordeaux (France) in April 1968

Further Reading
Debord, Guy
Society of the Spectacle

Rebel Press/Black and Red
£5.95
.

.Debord, Guy

Society of the Spectacle and Other Films
·

Rebel Press
0946061068
£5.50

Vaneigem, Raoul

Knabb, Ken
Situationist International Anthology

Bureau of Publi(Secrets
0939682001
f12.95
King Mob

King Mob Echo - English Section of the Situationist
International

Dark Star /Vague 31
1871692075
£6.oo

Tht;! Revolution of Everyday Life

Rebel Press
0946061017
£7.95

For a comprehensive bibliography of Situationist and
Situationist-inspirei:J texts consult:

Vaneigem, Raoul

The Realisation and Suppression of the Situationist
International - An Annotated Bibliography 1972 - 1992

A Cavalier History of Surrealism

AK Press
1873176945
£7·95

Ford, Simon
'

AK Press
1873176821 .
£7·95

Vienet, Rene
Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement,
France, May 68
·

·.

·

Rebel Press
0946o66o5X
£5.95
Gray, Chris

Leaving the 2oth Century: The Incomplete Work of the
Situationist International

Rebel [lress
0946061157
£9.90

Home, Stewart
The Assault on Culture - Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to
Class War

AK Press
1873176309
£5·95

}

rr:ni

All of the abovMitlesare cu
lyin prin t. Ifyou have any dif­
ficulty .obtaining any of the titles. they are all available mail
order from:
AK Distribution
P 0 Box 12766
Edinburgh

®
Afterword
There is a tradition of denigrating certain political ideas and actions by
describing them as Utopian, u n realistic, naive etc. We have deliberately cho­
sen the ti'tle of this Anthology as we feel it sums up im portant aspects of the
events in May. The im portance that graffiti1 posters, pamph lets etc played
both in terms of practical comm u nication and inspirational agitation cannot
be denied. Some of the slogans may on one level appear Utopian but a clos­
er analysis shows that they partake of the great Surrealist tradition of the

imaginative transformation of the world, a transformation firmly rooted in,
not an escape from, reality. As Andre Breton observed, "The Imaginary is that
which tends tci become real." On one level a slogqn on a .Parisian wall refer­
ring to the beach appears a contradiction. The beach with its connotation of
seaside holidays, fun and leisure scrawled on an urban wall in the capital of
France. However, although the quality of o u r illustrations doesn't allow us to
show it too clearly, if you look carefully at photographs of Parisian streets
which have had their paving stones/ cobbles torn up what can you see? Sand,
·

· '

·

·

of course.
For our records and for use in future editions of this book Dark Star would
welcome copies of the covers of the pamphlets reprinted in this book to
enable us to illustrate the widespread distribution of them both in terms of
time and geographical locations.
DARK STAR c/o AK Distribution

Dark Star would like to thank Chris Gray and
Ken Knabb, without whose translations this
anthology would not have been possible.
As Lautreamont observed, "Words expressing
evil are destined to take on a more positive
meaning. Ideas improve - the sense of words
takes part in this process. Plagiarism is necesÂ­
sary. it is implied in the idea of progress. it
clasps an author's sentence tight, uses his
expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces
it with the right idea.
To be well wrought, a maxim does not need to
be corrected. it needs to be developed. "

..

This anthology brings together the three most widely
translated, distributed and influential pamphlets of
the Situationist International available in the sixties,
along with an eyewitness account of the May Events
published in June 2968. Beneath The Paving Stones -

Sltuatlonlsts and the Beach in addition includes
numerous documents, photographs, poster art and
graffiti originating from Paris In 2968; It offers the
reader not only a concise introduction to the ideas of
the Situationists but also an insight into what
Situationist material was readily available in the late
sixties.